OTOF and Hearing impairment: Disruption of OTOF, coding for otoferlin, was identified to cause hereditary deafness DFNB9 (Yasunaga et al., 1999), while missense mutations of OTOF can lead to less profound hearing impairment (Varga et al., 2003; Marlin et al., 2010; Vogl et al., 2016; for review, see Pangršič et al., 2012; Moser and Starr, 2016).