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 established that oxidative stress plays a major role in uncoupling pre-synaptic and post synaptic signalling. The endogenous gas nitric oxide is a key intermediary in cardiac inter/intracellular signalling, where it regulates several ion channels that control cardiac excitability. His group has developed methods for targeting the enzyme involved in making nitric oxide-cGMP using a gene transfer approach involving cell specific viral vectors and FRET sensors to study the physiology of this messenger in normal and diseased hearts. This work is now being applied to a human iPSC 'disease in a dish' model where sympathetic neurons and cardiac cells are studied in mono/co-culture from patients with known cardiac channelopathies (CPVT/LQT) to test the idea these cardiac pathogies are also diseases of the autonomic nervous system.