Scientific Career
Colquhoun now researches the nature of the molecular interactions that cause single ion channels to open and shut, and what it is that controls the speed of synaptic events. The invention and successful application of the patch clamp technique by Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann allowed the individual openings and closings of single ion channels to be readily observed and recorded. However, experimentally observed recordings are random in nature. With the help of the statistician Alan G. Hawkes, Colquhoun developed a statistical method to interpret the data and test putative quantitative mechanisms for how ion channels function.
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