Dose response curve

In pharmacology, a dose response curve is a graph that visualizes the relationship between the dose of a drug and its response (effect) on an organism after a certain exposure time (Figure 1). The response may be of physical or biochemical nature. Usually, the dose is plotted on the x-axis and the response on the y-axis. Often, the use of a logarithmic scale is used for the x-axis resulting in a sigmoidal curve. This is in particular helpful to determine the EC50 of a drug.

Figure 1 Example of a dose response curve.