Nitric oxide (NO) plays many important physiological roles, including the regulation of vascular smooth muscle tone. In response to hemodynamic or agonist stimuli, endothelial cells produce NO, which can diffuse to smooth muscle where it activates soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC), leading to cGMP formation and smooth muscle relaxation. The close proximity of red blood cells suggests, however, th...

Cartilage oligomeric matrix protein (COMP/thrombospondin [TSP]-5) belongs to the thrombospondin gene family and is an extracellular glycoprotein found predominantly in cartilage and tendon. To date, there is limited evidence of COMP/TSP-5 expression outside of the skeletal system. The aim of the present study was to investigate the expression of COMP/TSP-5 in cultured human vascular smooth musc...

The intracellular scaffold protein IQGAP1 supports protein complexes in conjunction with numerous binding partners involved in multiple cellular processes. Here, we determined that IQGAP1 modulates airway smooth muscle contractility. Compared with WT controls, at baseline as well as after immune sensitization and challenge, Iqgap1-/- mice had higher airway responsiveness. Tracheal rings from Iq...

Mouse bladder mesenchyme differentiates into smooth muscle under the influence of urothelium at gestational day 13.5 (E13.5). Sonic hedgehog (Shh) is considered to be the upstream gene arising from the urothelium, which induces smooth muscle in the peripheral bladder mesenchyme. We hypothesize differential gene expression across the full thickness of bladder mesenchyme as a function of proximit...

o bjective: to determine the etiology, signs and symptoms, angiography indications and angiography findings in patients with limb penetrating injuries suspected to have arterial injury. m e thods: this was a cross-sectional study being performed in imam reza hospital affiliated with mashhad university of medical sciences, iran between september 2011 and march 2013. we included those patients wi...

The best approximation problem in a hyperconvex metric space consists of finding conditions for given set-valued mappings F andG and a setX such that there is a point x0 ∈ X satisfying d G x0 , F x0 ≤ d x, F x0 for x ∈ X. When G I, the identity mapping, and when the set X is compact, best approximation theorems for mappings in hyperconvex metric spaces are given for the single-valued case in 1–...

Many algorithms have to deal with multiple representations of the same object. The process of aligning these representations is called registration. In this paper we present a new approach for the registration of free-form surfaces which is not based on finding closest points. Instead, our algorithm takes advantage of the graphics hardware and uses the depth buffer for determining the distance ...

The proximity relations inherent in triangulations of geometric data can be exploited in the implementation of nearest-neighbour search procedures. This is relevant to applications such as terrain analysis, cartography and robotics, in which triangulations may be used to model the spatial data. Here we describe neighbourhood search procedures within constrained Delaunay triangulations of the ve...

Work on information retrieval has shown that language model smoothing leads to more accurate estimation of document models and hence is crucial for achieving good retrieval performance. Several smoothing methods have been proposed in the literature, using either semantic or positional information. In this paper, we propose a unified proximity-based framework to smooth language models, leveragin...