The Distinction between Agonist Binding and Receptor Activation

3 The Distinction between Agonist Binding and Receptor Activation 

Finally, we return to models of receptor action and to a further limitation of the early attempts to account for the shapes of concentration-response curves. As already noted, the simple concepts expressed in Eqs. (1.3) and (1.4) do not distinguish between the occupation and the activation of a receptor by an agonist. This distinction, it is now appreciated, is crucial to the understanding of the action of agonists and partial agonists. Indeed all contemporary accounts of receptor activation take as their starting point a mechanism of the following kind  

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