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. 2023 Nov 9;13:19456. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-46859-6

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Efferent innervation is richer on pillar side ANFs and increases transiently after noise, especially in fibers that maintain synaptic contact with the IHCs. (A–D) FIB-SEM images from control (A,B) and exposed (C,D) ears in which some of the ANFs are highlighted in blue or orange depending on whether the contact they make with an efferent terminal is considered synaptic (blue) or not (orange). (E) In the control ears, modiolar-side ANFs receive less efferent innervation than pillar-side ANFs. (F) After exposure, the surface area of efferent synaptic contacts increases at 1 day then returns to control values at 1 week. (G) In exposed ears, at both 1 day and 1 week post exposure, non-synapsing ANFs have significantly less efferent innervation than ANFs that retain their synaptic connections. P values for comparisons across survival times are not indicated in (G). In all panels horizontal lines on dot plots indicate the mean of each distribution. Data are from all the same fibers shown in Figs. 7 and 8.