Nitric oxide neuronal messenger role

Endogenous nitric oxide plays an important role as a messenger between neurons at synapses in the central nervous system [11] and fulfills the major... 

The gaseous free radical nitric oxide (NO), a non-conventional neural messenger, is synthesized in neurons by the enzyme nitric oxide synthase (NOS), which can be revealed in histological sections by NADPH-diaphorase histochemistry or NOS immunohisto-chemistry. The role of NO in neural signaling has raised considerable interest (see, for example, Schmidt and Walter, 1994), stemming also from the finding that NOS has a discrete distribution in subsets of brain neurons, including intense expression in neuronal subsets of the striatum (Vincent, 2000). 

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