D.S. Bredt, S.H. Snyder, "Isolation of nitric oxide synthetase, a calmodulin-requiring enzyme," PNAS, 87:682-5, 1990.
Solomon Snyder (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore): "As a card-carrying neuroscientist and psychiatrist, I am supposed to be concerned primarily with things of the brain. However, when I first read the seminal papers that showed that nitric oxide was responsible for the ability of neurotransmitters to dilate blood vessels, I was fascinated. I wondered whether nitric oxide might also play a role in brain function. Just about this time, I read a publication reporting detection of a nitric oxide-like molecule in brain tissue (J. Garthwaite, S.J. Charles, R. Chess-Williams, Nature, 336:385-88, 1988).
"Following initial studies showing that nitric oxide does mediate neurotransmitter activity in the brain (D.S. Bredt, S.H. Snyder, PNAS, 86:9030-33, 1989), David Bredt, an M.D./Ph.D. student, and I wanted to pinpoint more precisely how and where nitric oxide acts in the...