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. 2014 Jul 18;9(7):e102077. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0102077

Figure 1. An increase in hair cells in the inner hair cell region after ATOH1 gene therapy.

Figure 1

Example photomicrographs of surface preparations of the basal turn of the cochlea from (A) normal, (B) four day deaf, (C) Ad-GFP treated, (D) Ad-ATOH1 treated animals (red  =  myosinVIIa, green  =  GFP, blue  =  DAPI, dashed lines mark the sensory region, scale bar  = 20 µm). (E) When quantified there was a significant loss of IHCs after four days of deafness compared to normal hearing animals. Three weeks post ATOH1-gene therapy there were significantly more myosinVIIa positive cells in the IHC region compared with the four day deaf group (*p<0.05, ANOVA). This number however remained below that observed in normal cochleae which had a greater number of IHCs compared to any other treatment group (#p<0.05, ANOVA). (F) A comparison of treated (injected) versus non-treated (contralateral) cochleae showed ATOH1-injected cochleae to have a significantly greater number of IHCs relative to the contralateral control cochleae (§p<0.05 paired t-test).