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Cells are sensitive to many forms of stimuli including light and heat, but little is known about the cellular response to acoustic pressure—a.k.a. sound.
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A new study suggests that cells can indeed hear. It’s not the way we typically think of hearing, but cells sense acoustic vibrations, and these vibrations can change cellular behavior.
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Scientists identified some 190 sound-sensitive genes, including ones that impact cell and tissue states.
While sound is a relatively simple phenomenon—acoustic waves traveling through a medium—processing sound so that our brains can understand it is a bit more complicated. The smallest bones in the human body (known as the ossicles) transmit sound from the air to the inner ear, where the spiral-shaped cochlea transforms those vibrations into electrical impulses with the help of some 25,000 auditory nerves—all in a millisecond-long process known as auditory transduction.
However, this isn’t the only way to process sound. And in fact, humans even deploy another method known as bone conduction, which uses sound vibrating through our bones and bypassing the outer and middle ear altogether. With the help of these acoustic methods, animals receive vital information about their environment to aid in their survival—and a new study suggests that the same could be true for our cells.
Of course, cells don’t possess the auditory organs necessary for human-like hearing, but scientists from Kyoto University suspect that cells do utilize acoustic information in a somewhat similar way to bone conduction. The scientists designed an experiment to emit acoustic pressure that could conceivably be interpreted by cells as vibration and then monitored the effects of this sound bath on the cells’ RNA via microscopy. They found that sound did impact cellular behavior, particularly for controlling cell and tissue states. The results of the study were published in the journal Communications Biology.
“To investigate the effect of sound on cellular activities, we designed a system to bathe cultured cells in acoustic waves,” Masahiro Kumeta, one of the authors on the study, said in a press statement.
In a previous 2018 study, Kumeta and his team discovered that acoustic waves impacted “mechanosensative” genes, which included bone formation and wound healing. After two hours of exposure, these genes were shown to be suppressed by a whopping 40 percent. They also found that these changes were impacted by types of waveforms and decibel levels.
Seven years later, Kumeta has now identified some 190 sound-sensitive genes, and specifically found that preadipocytes—fat cell precursors—experienced a suppression of adipocyte differentiation, which is when these precursors form into full-fledged fat cells. Understanding that sound can have impact on even the smallest biological components comes with some pretty big implications.
“Since sound is non-material, acoustic stimulation is a tool that is non-invasive, safe, and immediate, and will likely benefit medicine and healthcare,” Kumeta said in a press statement.
Of course, Kumeta isn’t the first person to suggest that acoustics could be a valuable tool in developing non-invasive therapies and medicines. Stanford University, for example, has demonstrated how to rearrange densely-packed heart cells, creating something akin to natural heart tissue. And the American Psychological Association has written for years about how music can help ease certain psychological conditions and promote healing.
If acoustic waves can impact biological beings down to our very cells, it’s no wonder that sound can have potentially life-saving medicinal uses.
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