The goal of this study was to determine how myogenic responses and vascular responses to reduced Po(2) interact to determine vascular smooth muscle (VSM) transmembrane potential and active tone in isolated middle cerebral arteries from Sprague-Dawley rats. Stepwise elevation of transmural pressure led to depolarization of the VSM cells and myogenic constriction, and reduction of the O(2) concen...

The present study tests the hypothesis that vascular cells promote the survival of postganglionic sympathetic neurons in the absence of nerve growth factor (NGF). To test this hypothesis, neurons isolated from superior cervical ganglia of 2- to 4-day-old rat pups were grown in the absence of NGF and in the absence and presence of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSM). Neuronal survival was assesse...

Genomic data combined with reverse genetic approaches have contributed to the characterization of major virulence factors of Vibrio species; however, these studies have targeted primarily human pathogens. Here, we investigate virulence factors in the oyster pathogen Vibrio splendidus LGP32 and show that toxicity is correlated to the presence of a metalloprotease and its corresponding vsm gene. ...

Background: The structure of human placenta adapts in an uniform manner under different form of hypoxic stress. Anaemia, the common obstetric problem leading to hypoxia alters the structure of placenta. Aim: To compare the incidence of Vasculosyncytial membrane (VSM) in full term placenta of normal and anaemic mothers. Materials and Methods: Hundred (100) term placenta comprising of 50 normal a...

Query and document representation is a key problem for information retrieval and filtering. The vector space model (VSM) has been widely used in this domain. But the VSM suffers from high dimensionality. The vectors built from documents always have high dimensionality and contain too much noise. In this paper, we present a novel method that reduces the dimensionality using multilingual resource...

To enhance the retrieval accuracy of information search engine, this paper proposes a information retrieval system based on semantics and document refinement that realized by employing the semantic description and relevance of ontology to the information system. We describe the using of LSI (latent semantic indexing) approach to replace the traditional VSM (vector-space model) approach in detai...

We explore the performance of the Vector Space Model (VSM) in finding verb synonyms in Portuguese by analyzing the impact of three operating parameters: (i) the weighting function, (ii) the context window used for automatically extracting features, and (iii) the minimum number of vector features. We rely on distributional statistics taken from a large n-gram database to build feature vectors, u...

Synapses are composed of a presynaptic active zone in the signaling cell and a postsynaptic terminal in the target cell. In the case of chemical synapses, messages are carried by neurotransmitters released from presynaptic terminals and received by receptors on postsynaptic cells. Our previous research in Caenorhabditis elegans has shown that VSM-1 negatively regulates exocytosis. Additionally,...

Ca sensitization of vascular smooth muscle (VSM) contraction involves Rho-dependent and Rho-kinase– dependent suppression of myosin phosphatase activity. We previously demonstrated that excitatory agonists in fact induce activation of RhoA in VSM. In this study, we demonstrate a novel Ca -dependent mechanism for activating RhoA in rabbit aortic VSM. High KCl-induced membrane depolarization as w...