Robert Fettiplace has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of sound transduction and demonstrated that each hair cell in the cochlea of the inner ear is sensitive to a specific range of sound frequencies. His experiments revealed that hair cells are organized along the cochlea in a pattern that reflects their frequency selectivity. Using sensitive physiological measurements and theoretical modeling, he discovered that this selectivity reflects an intrinsic electrical property of the cell, set by the density and kinetics of its ion channels that induce a resonance at a particular frequency.
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