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David Paterson leads a research team in the area of cardiac neurobiology. They are interested in how both branches of the cardiac autonomic nervous system communicate at the end organ level and whether oxidative stress plays a role in uncoupling pre-synaptic and post synaptic signalling. The endogenous gas nitric oxide is now thought to be a key intermediary in cardiac inter/intracellular signalling, where it has been shown to regulate several ion channels that control cardiac excitability. His group has developed a method for targeting the enzyme involved in making nitric oxide using a gene transfer approach involving cell specific viral vectors to study the physiology of this messenger in normal and diseased hearts.