The experimental procedure for finding out where drugs act and for finding out about a tissue's receptors is quite simple.
For each combination of agonist and antagonist:
- You construct the dose-response curve of the agonist when no antagonist is present.
- Then you construct the dose-response curve in the presence of several different concentrations of the antagonist.
- Next, you plot the results for each dose-response curve on the same set of axes so that you can compare the curves.
- Finally, you compare the sets of dose-response curves for all the combinations and look for similarities and differences between the results.