Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Organ of Corti
Summary
The organ of Corti, or spiral organ, is the receptor organ for hearing and is located in the mammalian cochlea. This highly varied strip of epithelial cells allows for transduction of auditory signals into nerve impulses' action potential. Transduction occurs through vibrations of structures in the inner ear causing displacement of cochlear fluid and movement of hair cells at the organ of Corti to produce electrochemical signals.
Italian anatomist Alfonso Giacomo Gaspare Corti (1822–1876) discovered the organ of Corti in 1851. The structure evolved from the basilar papilla and is crucial for mechanotransduction in mammals.
The organ of Corti is located in the scala media of the cochlea of the inner ear between the vestibular duct and the tympanic duct and is composed of mechanosensory cells, known as hair cells. Strategically positioned on the basilar membrane of the organ of Corti are three rows of outer hair cells (OHCs) and one row of inner hair cells (IHCs). Surrounding these hair cells are supporting cells: Deiters cells, also called phalangeal cells, which have a close relation with the OHCs, and pillar cells, which separate and support both the OHCs and the IHCs.
Projecting from the tops of the hair cells are tiny finger-like projections called stereocilia, which are arranged in a graduated fashion with the shortest stereocilia on the outer rows and the longest in the center. This gradation is thought to be the most important anatomic feature of the organ of Corti because this allows the sensory cells superior tuning capability.
If the cochlea were uncoiled, it would roll out to be about 33 mm long in women and 34 mm in men, with about 2.28 mm of standard deviation for the population. The cochlea is also tonotopically organized, meaning that different frequencies of sound waves interact with different locations on the structure. The base of the cochlea, closest to the outer ear, is the most stiff and narrow and is where the high-frequency sounds are transduced.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related courses (1)
BIOENG-448: Fundamentals of neuroengineering
Neuroengineering is at the frontier between neuroscience and engineering: understanding how the brain works allows developing engineering applications and therapies of high impact, while the design of
Related publications (32)
Related people (5)