Autobiographie

I was born during the second world war in Stuttgart, the capital of Swebia, as the first of two children. My father, Bertold Sakmann, was the director of a theatre, the third son of a physician whose family had lived in southern Germany for several generations. My mother, Annemarie Sakmann, was a physiotherapist and was born in Bangkok, the second child of a Prussian physician who served as doctor to the King of Siam and was the founder of the first hospital in Siam.

When Otto Creutzfeldt offered me the opportunity to run a laboratory of my own in his department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, I gladly accepted because other physicochemical and biochemically orientated departments there seemed to provide the right background for molecular physiology. Erwin Neher had moved to Göttingen as well, and we agreed to characterize different subtypes of acetylcholine activated channels with biophysical methods. This project went rather well, and it suggested to us that ion channels in denervated muscle fibres might be a good choice to try out extracellular pipettes for the recording of elementary events. Some initial success was followed by many frustrations in attempts to improve the seal resistance by choice of different preparations and treatments of pipette tips. Finally, with the help of a group of very dedicated collaborators, Owen Hamill, Alain Marty and Fred Sigworth, we succeeded in establishing patch clamp recording configurations which allowed us to investigate almost any type of channel in almost every cell type. A practical course, and the book that resulted from this course, marked the end of our primary focus on methodological problems, and allowed me to concentrate my efforts on understanding the role of ion channels in synaptic signalling at the molecular level. The resulting work was carried out with David Colquhoun and Joachim Bormann in the following years.

The next methodological step was to apply molecular biology techniques to problems of ion channel physiology. It seemed that proper use of recombinant channels in Xenopus oocytes could only be made in combination with single channel conductance measurements. Together with Veit Witzemann we found a simple way to free mRNA-injected oocytes from their covering layers to perform the first single channel conductance measurements from heterogeneously-expressed acetylcholine receptors. Later, Shosaku Numa suggested we collaborate combining patch clamp and recombinant DNA techniques to establish structure-function relations of the acetylcholine receptor. This fruitful collaboration identified the structural basis of channel subtypes and localized domains important for ion transport. It also provided me with a strong incentive to learn recombinant DNA techniques myself. When I later established my own department, I made sure that the techniques of cellular biophysics and molecular biology were well represented. As a result, I was well equipped to follow my strong interest in structure-function relations of ion channels and in the synaptogenesis of the neuromuscular junction.

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