Recently, the team of Professor Gao Jiangang at School of Life Science, SDU, published an paper entitled “Tuberous sclerosis complex–mediated mTORC1 overactivation promotes age-related hearing loss ” in The Journal of Clinical Investigation（IF 14.4）. The affiliations of both first author and correspondence author are SDU. The first author is Fu Xiaolong, and the co-correspondence authors are Gao Jiangang and Wang Haibo.

Age related hearing loss (ARHL) is the most common chronic sensory disorder in the elderly. In order to reveal the specific pathogenesis of ARHL, Gao’s research team first used wild C57BL/6J mice to carry out work. They found that the activity of mTORC1 in cochlear sensory neurons (NSE) was significantly increased in elderly C57BL/6J mice. They further developed raptor-specific knockout mice in NSE. The inactivation of mTORC1 signaling pathway in cochlear NSE was found to be sufficient to prevent ARHL in mice. Conversely, the persistent activation of mTORC1 signaling pathway in NSE could lead to premature death of hair cells. Further studies showed that rapamycin and antioxidant NAC could prevent the damage of auditory hair cells in Tsc1-/- mice. In addition, peroxisome was found to be an important signaling organelle involved in the regulation of mTORC1 signal in inner hair cells. This study is the first to elucidate the role of mTORC1 signaling pathway in ARHL, thus providing new insight for the prevention and treatment of ARHL.

Theresearch discoveryis the significant progress in the field of age related hearing loss. On 7 December, 2018，the website of National Natural Science Foundation of China reported this discovery entitled“Chinese scholars made important discovery in the mechanism of age related hearing loss”（http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/publish/portal0/tab448/info74683.htm）. This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No 81670943) and the National Basic Research Program (973) of China (No. 2014CB541703).

The link of this paper：https://www.jci.org/articles/view/98058.

Figure. Tsc-mTORC1 signaling affects age related hearing loss by the regulation of redox homeostasis in cochlear hair cells.

Source: School of Life Science

Edited by: Che Huiqing