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Birds on a wire and tiling the inner ear

Nature Genetics volume 21, pages 253–254 (1999) Cite this article

There you are, walking or driving along, and above you on an overhead telephone wire is a familiar yet engaging sight—four-and-twenty blackbirds (more or less) sitting neatly spaced apart, separated by about one bird's width. It's a delightful behavioural example of "lateral inhibition", in which the interaction between each bird and its neighbours keeps them from sitting too close together, generating a regular one-dimensional mosaic of bird-space-bird.

On page 289 of this issue, Pamela Lanford and colleagues report the latest and most definitive of a recent burst of studies showing that a lateral inhibition mechanism, mediated by the Notch cell-cell signalling pathway, is at work in generating the two-dimensional mosaic of the sensory epithelium in the vertebrate inner ear1. In the mouse, this tissue contains four regular rows of mechanosensory hair cells (these carry out the business of receiving the auditory stimulus) — one row of inner hair cells plus three rows of outer hair cells. Each hair cell is separated from its neighbouring hair cells by an intervening supporting cell, creating a beautiful tiled pattern. A strong indication that lateral inhibition might play a role in establishing this pattern came from a previous study in which a laser microbeam was used to ablate single differentiating hair cells2. It was found that adjacent cells in the epithelium could alter their presumptive fate and replace the ablated sensory cells, suggesting that most or all of the cells initially have the potential to adopt the hair cell fate, but that some are directed to do otherwise by an inhibitory signal from developing hair-cell neighbours.

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  1. Department of Biology, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, 92093-0349, California, USA

    James W. Posakony

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  1. James W. Posakony
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Posakony, J. Birds on a wire and tiling the inner ear. Nat Genet 21, 253–254 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/6760

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