Enhanced signal-to-noise ratios in frog hearing can be achieved through amplitude death

Abstract

In the ear, hair cells transform mechanical stimuli into neuronal signals with great sensitivity, relying on certain active processes. Individual hair cell bundles ofnon-mammals suchas frogs and turtles are known to showspontaneous oscillation. However, hair bundles in vivo must be quiet in the absence of stimuli, otherwise the signal is drowned in intrinsic noise. Thus, a certain mechanism is required in order to suppress intrinsic noise. Here, through a model study of elastically coupled hair bundles of bullfrog sacculi, we show that a low stimulus threshold and a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be achieved through the amplitude death phenomenon (the cessation of spontaneous oscillations by coupling). This phenomenon occurs only when the coupled hair bundles have inhomogeneous distribution, which is likely to be the case in biological systems. We show that the SNR has non-monotonic dependence on themass of the overlyingmembrane, and find out that the SNR hasmaximum value in the region of amplitude death. The low threshold of stimulus through amplitude death may account for the experimentally observed high sensitivity of frog sacculi in detecting vibration. The hair bundles' amplitude death mechanism provides a smart engineering design for low-noise amplification. © 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.