Hashino Lab
Principal Investigator: Eri Hashino
Institution: Indiana University Indianapolis (Indianapolis, IN)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY During inner ear development, multipotent otic progenitors give rise to mechanosensitive hair cells through a series of cell-fate transition points. The transcriptional cascades dictating hair cell specification have not been defined although a number of transcription factors essential for inner ear development have been identified. Using a human pluripotent stem cell-derived vestibular organoid system that allows mechanistic investigation due to its scalability, we performed a trajectory analysis of otic lineage cells using scRNA-seq. Our results suggest that supporting cells are precursors of hair cells in human vestibular organoids. Additionally, we identified LHX3 as a candidate hair cell driver gene, whose expression precedes ATOH1, a previously perceived hair cell driver. Moreover, our transcriptomic analysis between human vestibular and cochlear organoids revealed that NR2F1 is among the most differentially expressed genes in both otic progenitors and hair cells in cochlear organoids than in vestibular organoids. Based on these findings, we propose a series of experiments to define the role for LHX3 and NR2F1 in hair cell and cochlear specification, respectiv…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01DC013294-13: Modeling Inner Ear Differentiation with Pluripotent Stem Cells (2026)
- 5R01DC021857-02: Modeling CHARGE Syndrome with Human Inner Ear Organoids (2026)
- 5R01DC020628-05: Engineering High-Fidelity Human Cochlear Organoids (2026)
- 5R01DC022274-02: Sensory Development in Human Cochlear Organoids (2026)
- 1R01DC021857-01A1: Modeling CHARGE Syndrome with Human Inner Ear Organoids (2025)
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