It would be interesting to study more systematically the disappearance of these cells to determine whether they died due to the absence of a survival signal as observed in other strial-defect-related deafness models, such as for the MITF mutation, where MITF has been suspected to be an important melanocyte survival factor (Ni et al., 2013; Steel and Barkway, 1989). The gene discussed is MITF; the disease is deafness.