Our laboratory works on inner ear development and regeneration, as well as on the biology of sensory hair cells, the mechanosensitive cells of the inner ear. We are located at Stanford University in the School of Medicine and affiliated with the Otolaryngology department. We are proudly affiliated with the Stanford Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss and we thank all supporters of this endeavor.
We are interested how the inner ear develops from an early anlage called the otic placode. Our goal is to describe the otic lineage from an early placodal progenitor until it splits up in multiple cell types making up the sensory epithelia, innervating ganglia, and accessory structures.
In parallel, we apply knowledge we gained from guiding embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells along the otic lineage to find ways for treatment of hearing loss. This involves identification of mechanisms of sensory hair cell regeneration in animals such as chickens that recover naturally from hearing loss, screening for potential regenerative targets that can be activated with drugs, and exploring reprograming as well as cell transplantation strategies.
The image shown above depicts the embryonic mouse inner ear stained with an antibody to a protein that is specifically expressed in the otic lineage. Postdoctoral fellow Byron Hartman is working on this ongoing project and provided this spectacular image.
We are actively looking to hire a postdoctoral fellow or research associate with substantial experience in computational biology as well as knowledge of computer graphics and strategies for analysis of high dimensional data. The new team member needs to be exceptionally creative and motivated to apply his/her computational training toward solving biologically relevant questions.
Similarly, we are looking for a postdoctoral fellow to join our group in 2016. The successful candidate should have a strong interest in solving open questions how fate decisions in the developing and regenerating inner ear are being orchestrated. We expect strong work ethics, creativity, and ability to independently learn and implement new technologies. A background in bioinformatics or interest in computational analysis methods of single cell transcriptome data is a requirement.
If you are interested in joining our group, please send a single introductory paragraph and your CV to Stefan Heller at hellers@stanford.edu
Who are we?
March 2014
• Durruthy-Durruthy, R., Gottlieb, A. & Heller, S. 3D computational reconstruction of tissues with hollow spherical morphologies using single-cell gene expression data. Nature Protocols 10, 459-474 (2015). http://www.nature.com/nprot/journal/v10/n3/full/nprot.2015.022.html
This paper is a follow up on last year’s paper published in Cell. We were not able to provide detailed step-by-step instructions about the 3D reconstruction method in the original publication, but we thought that the method would be useful to others. 3 of the 4 reviewers agreed with this view, but it took a while to convince the fourth reviewer. If one follows the topics of the lab’s publications, there is an emerging theme of combining novel ideas for bioinformatics data analysis and visualization with important questions in inner ear biology. The current revolution of single cell transcriptomics is going to impact our field enormously.
November 2014, a sunny day in Palo Alto and I finally find some time to update our lab blog. A nasty cold…
Half way through the year and it is time for an update. Research is tagging along nicely and several projects are now…
It is incredible how quickly time passes, ⅓ of 2014 is already gone by. The month of April was important at many…
For our laboratory, it is always a special moment when we publish a paper in a high-ranking journal. Today is one of…
