Approximately half of all types of deafness are inherited or passed along from parents to their children through their genes. Nonsyndromic recessive deafness, caused by two copies of the same mutated gene from each parent, accounts for approximately 80 percent of those cases.
Recessive deafness occurs sporadically in families sometimes skipping several generations.
Most individuals with recessive deafness have hearing parents and may have brothers and sisters who can hear and others who are deaf. The sporadic nature of this type of deafness along with the lack of other physical characteristics have made identification of individuals with the same altered or mutated gene difficult to identify and study. These investigators used a mouse model to identify the new protein. Myo15 gene was recently discovered by his collaborators, Sally Camper, Ph.D., and graduate student Frank Probst, at the University of Michigan, also causing deafness in the shaker-2 mouse. Myosins are a large family of proteins that are found in most human cells.