期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：1999
卷号：96
期号：13
页码：7244-7249
DOI：10.1073/pnas.96.13.7244
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：The outer hair cell has a unique voltage-dependent motility associated with charge transfer across the plasma membrane. To examine mechanical changes in the membrane that are coupled with such charge movements, we digested the undercoating of the membrane with trypsin. We inflated the cell into a sphere and constrained the surface area by not allowing volume changes. We found that this constraint on the membrane area sharply reduced motor-associated charge movement across the membrane, demonstrating that charge transfer is directly coupled with membrane area change. This electromechanical coupling in the plasma membrane must be the key element for the motile mechanism of the outer hair cell.
