The McGovern Lab investigates the potential of the mammalian inner ear to regenerate following the loss of sensory cells that detect and transduce sound from the environment to the brain. These highly specialized cells are critical for our perception of the auditory world, but, unlike birds and fish, the mammalian inner ear has a very limited capacity to regenerate these cells and only early in development. The mature organ does not have any known capacity to naturally regenerate lost cells, and therefore our lab deploys transcription factors in order to reprogram lost sensory cells from their neighbors that remain in the ear. We use genetically modified mouse lines that modify the transcriptome of cochlear cells specifically in mature non-sensory cells of the ear and investigate these through high resolution fluorescence histology and molecular genetic mechanisms. We are interested in understanding the circumstances necessary to reprogram non-hair cells into functional hair cells so that we can begin to design gene therapies for hearing restoration.
1) Molecular biology including gene and protein expression assays of inner ear tissue to investigate effects of gene deletion or expression on cellular identity.
2) Injection of viral particles into the inner ear to investigate targeting and reprogramming for development of a gene therapy.
3) Bioinformatics analysis including multiome sequencing and CUT&RUN (transcription factor binding) sequencing of the inner ear.