Bruce Riley, a Texas A&M University biologist, has 20,000 zebra fish and a $1.5 million federal grant to help him study how hair cells regenerate in zebra fish and to develop a cure for deafness.

Riley studies the inner-ear development of the striped tropical minnows because the genes of all vertebrates are remarkably similar.

“Our research is founded on the simple idea that the genes that control the development of the inner ear are the same in fish and humans,” Riley said. “We’re trying to figure out what genes control regeneration of zebrafish hair cells, which control hearing. The hope is that if we can understand them, maybe we can figure out a way to coax a similar response out of the equivalent cells in a human. I absolutely believe that’s going to happen in our lifetime. And in principle, it could literally be a cure for deafness.”

Riley’s research program, which broadly uses zebrafish as a model by which to investigate how genes control development, received the grant renewal from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).

In his lab, Riley investigates how zebrafish regenerate hearing, a quality that most vertebrates have aside from humans and mammals. Researchers can zap a mature zebrafish hair cell with a laser, and a rapid regeneration response kicks in that restores the cell within 12-to-24 hours by reactivating early developmental genetic programs. It doesn’t work that way in humans: Once a hair cell dies, it’s lost forever. But figuring out the cells that control hair cell regeneration in zebrafish and how they work potentially could give insight into how to replicate that process in humans.

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