Recessive mutations in myosin 15, a class XV unconventional myosin, cause profound congenital deafness in humans and both deafness and vestibular dysfunction in mice homozygous for the shaker 2 and shaker 2(J) alleles. The shaker 2 allele is a previously described missense mutation of a highly conserved residue in the motor domain of myosin XV. The shaker 2(J) lesion, in contrast, is a 14.7 kb ...

Mutations of the unconventional myosins genes encoding myosin VI, myosin VIIA and myosin XV cause hearing loss and thus these motor proteins perform fundamental functions in the auditory system. A null mutation in myosin VI in the congenitally deaf Snell's waltzer mice (Myo6(sv)) results in fusion of stereocilia and subsequent progressive loss of hair cells, beginning soon after birth, thus rei...

Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) with deafness is clinically distinct among the genetically heterogeneous group of CMT disorders. Molecular studies in a large family with autosomal dominant CMT and deafness have not been reported. The present molecular study involves a family with progressive features of CMT and deafness, originally reported by Kousseff et al. Genetic analysis of 70 individual...

hearing loss (hl) is the most common communication disorder affecting about 1/1000 births worldwide caused by environmental or genetic factors. about 30-50% is attributed to genetic factors and till now more than 85 genes have been implicated in non-syndromic hl. in iran, hl is second to intellectual disability as the most common disability, affecting 1 of every 166 persons. about 15 years ago ...

Congenital hearing loss has been documented to occur in 1 of 1000 live births, with over half of these cases predicted to be hereditary in nature. 2 Most hereditary hearing loss is inherited in a recessive manner, accounting for approximately 85% of non-syndromic hearing loss (NSHL). Deafness is an extremely genetically heterogeneous disorder, shown by the fact that 33 loci for recessive NSHL a...

We have developed an advantageous epithelial cell transfection model for examining the targeting, interactions, and mutations of hair cell proteins. When expressed in LLC-PK1-CL4 epithelial cells (CL4 cells), the outer hair cell protein prestin showed faithful domain-specific targeting to the basolateral plasma membrane. We examined the consequences of mutations affecting prestin activity and a...

BACKGROUND Autosomal recessive non-syndromic hearing loss (ARNSHL) is the most common hereditary form of deafness, and exhibits a great deal of genetic heterogeneity. So far, more than seventy various DFNB loci have been mapped for ARNSHL by linkage analysis. The contribution of three common DFNB loci including DFNB3, DFNB9, DFNB21 and gap junction beta-2 (GJB2) gene mutations in ARNSHL was inv...

Hearing loss affects more than 25 million Americans and costs over 50 billion dollars each year, surpassing the combined financial impact of multiple sclerosis, stroke, epilepsy, spinal injury, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s disease (1). Inherited deafness affects one child in 2,000, and equal numbers of children are born with a significant loss of hearing from other causes (2). In the general p...