Mechanical Overstimulation of Hair Bundles: Suppression and Recovery of Active Motility
Figure 1
Example of hair bundle motility post-stimulus, with a diagram of the extracted parameters.
The gray/black curve shows the position of the bundle, with motion towards the kinocilium being positive. An automatic routine detected bundle oscillations (gray) from which the onset time of the first oscillation () was determined. A sum of two exponentials (see Eq. 1) was fitted to the bundle’s position in the closed state (black), thus ignoring the oscillations. From the fit (red: ), the time to reach steady state () was calculated as the time for which its derivative first reached nm/ms. It was also used to calculate the bundle’s total offset (), defined as the difference between the position at t = 0 and the end of the recording. The stimulus was a one-second DC offset in positive direction. The curve starts at t = 0, which corresponds to 5 ms after cessation of the stimulus.