page_title: David Colquhoun
section_title: Work with single ion channels
hierarchical_section_title: David Colquhoun / Scientific career / Work with single ion channels
caption_attribution_description: English: Course mug for UCL's summer workshop on matrix algebra for single ion channels
context_page_description: David Colquhoun FRS MAE is a British pharmacologist at University College London. He has contributed to the general theory of receptor and synaptic mechanisms, and in particular the theory and practice of single ion channel function. He held the A.J. Clark chair of Pharmacology at UCL from 1985 to 2004, and was the Hon. Director of the Wellcome Laboratory for Molecular Pharmacology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985 and an honorary fellow of UCL in 2004. Colquhoun runs the website DC's Improbable Science, which is critical of pseudoscience, particularly alternative medicine, and managerialism.
context_section_description: In 1977 Colquhoun and Hawkes predicted that ion channel openings would be expected to occur in brief bursts rather than as single openings, and this prediction was verified in experiments with Bert Sakmann, in Göttingen and London (1981). This work led to the first solution of the classical pharmacological problem of measuring separately the affinity and efficacy of an agonist. In the context of ion channels, this problem is also known as the binding/gating problem. This problem remains unsolved for G protein-coupled receptors, because it was shown in 1987 that the classical methods for determining affinity and efficacy were based on a misapprehension.
  The 1985 paper was later nominated as a "classic" by The Journal of Physiology. In 1982 Colquhoun & Hawkes published a paper on the theory of bursts (and clusters of bursts) which gave a general expression for the distribution of the burst length (shown here on the design for a mug for those who attend a course designed to teach the mathematics needed for the equation).
  It was clear that the burst length was what controlled the decay rate of synaptic currents, though the formal relationship was not derived until 1998.
caption: Course mug design for the Department of Pharmacology at UCL
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