Class V β Tubulin during the development of the organ of Corti in rat

In eutherian mammals, the organ responsible for the transduction of sound waves into nerve impulses is called the organ of Corti. This structure located within the cochlea, a portion of the inner ear, is composed by two types of cells: sensory hair cells and non-sensory supporting cells. All these cells are distributed according to a specific arrangement along the whole length of the cochlea. A feature of the organ of Corti’s supporting cell is the presence of an abundant cytoskeleton. This one is mainly composed of microtubules, structures make up by tubulin heterodimers. The heterodimers consist of one molecule of α tubulin and one molecule of β tubulin. β tubulin isotypes are highly conserved in evolution and differ by only a few amino acid residues, implying that the isotypes may have functional significance. Organ of Corti’s supporting cells are constituted by class V β-tubulin, a minor mammalian tubulin (Bhattacharya et al., 2008). Moreover, their microtubules are formed by 15 protofilaments instead of the canonical 13, a unique fact among vertebrates (Banerjee et al., 2008). Such a configuration of protofilaments has been observed in C. elegans’ neurons which are responsible for the mechanosensory sense of touch (Bounoutas et al., 2009). It was also shown that these 15 protofilaments microtubules were essential to the proper functioning of these mechanosensory neurons (Bounoutas et al., 2009).
Here we present the spatiotemporal localization of class V β-tubulin during the development of the organ of Corti in rats from embryonic day 18 (E18) until P25 (25th postnatal day). For this purpose, we have used immunolabelings on cryosections of whole cochlea. Our preliminary results demonstrate that class V β-tubulin has a unique distribution in the cochlea, being restricted to supporting cells, especially in pillar cells.