Researchers awarded a grant from the NIDCD
Research
Tulane University press center recently announced that a researcher at the institution has been awarded a USD 1.8 million grant to study how auditory signals are processed in the context of normal hearing and how they are altered in hearing loss.
Dr Hai Huang, assistant professor in cell and molecular biology at the university will use the 5-year grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) to study this important area of research.
Dr Huang and his team will use hearing-impaired and normal-hearing mice as part of their research. They will study auditory information processing at the synapse level, an area that may provide interesting insights into how hearing loss works. Previous research by other scientific teams has focused primarily on the post-synaptic site, while the team at Tulane will look at pre-synaptic mechanisms. Earlier research by the team has opened up a new avenue of investigation in this area.
“The pre-synaptic change is poorly understood,” Huang said in the university statement. “We will test how hearing loss affects vesicle loading, release and recycling. The project aims to understand the synaptic mechanisms that support the highly reliable synaptic transmission at auditory synapses at normal hearing and during hearing loss.”
Tulane University is a research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana (USA) and has over 13,000 students.
Source: Tulane University
