How acetylcholine gives rise to current at the motor end-plate

摘要

At about the same time as Hodgkin and Huxley's work on squid axons appeared in The Journal of Physiology, Paul Fatt and Bernard Katz published 'An analysis of the end-plate potential recorded with an intracellular electrode' (Fatt & Katz, 1951).' This was a revolutionary paper that for the first time explained how a chemical transmitter reacted with its receptors to give rise to an electrical signal. Fatt and Katz provided definitive answers to a host of questions regarding acetylcholine-induced permeability changes (questions that experts in the field had not even thought of). Thereafter, it became possible to study transmitters other than acetyicholine, and to analyse transmission in the central nervous system.