Cawley SM, Kolodziej S, Ichinose F, Brouckaert P, Buys ES, Bloch KD. sGC 1 mediates the negative inotropic effects of NO in cardiac myocytes independent of changes in calcium handling. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol 301: H157–H163, 2011. First published May 2, 2011; doi:10.1152/ajpheart.01273.2010.—In the heart, nitric oxide (NO) modulates contractile function; however, the mechanisms responsi...

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Liu, Rong, Oleg V. Evgenov, and Fumito Ichinose. NOS3 deficiency augments hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction and enhances systemic oxygenation during one-lung ventilation in mice. J Appl Physiol 98: 748–752, 2005. First published October 1, 2004; doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00820.2004.—Nitric oxide (NO), synthesized by NO synthases (NOS), plays a pivotal role in regulation of pulmonary vascular to...

Neutral ceramidase activity has previously been identified in the intestinal mucosa and gut lumen and postulated to be important in the digestion of sphingolipids. It is found throughout the intestine but has never been fully characterized. We have purified rat intestinal neutral ceramidase from an eluate obtained by perfusing the intestinal lumen with 0.9% NaCl and 3 mM sodium taurodeoxycholat...

For any nonnegative self-adjoint operators A and B in a separable Hilbert space, we show that the Trotter-type formula [(ei2tA/n + ei2tB/n)/2]n converges strongly in dom(A1/2) ∩ dom(B1/2) for some subsequence and for almost every t ∈ R. This result extends to the degenerate case and to Katofunctions following the method of Kato [6]. In a famous paper [6], T. Kato proved that for any nonnegative...

Sir, We read with great interest the study titled ‘Parkinson’s disease in GTP cyclohydrolase 1 mutation carriers’ in the September edition of Brain (Mencacci et al., 2014). The study demonstrates loss-of-function variants in the GCH1 gene are not only a major cause of DOPA-responsive dystonia but are also enriched in relatives with adult-onset parkinsonism. Furthermore, the authors identify, th...

The recent development and implementation of a catheter-based approach to denervate the renal sympathetic nerves in patients with resistant hypertension has ensured that the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) remains on center stage in cardiovascular medicine (Krum et al., 2009). Given this current interest in the field, the research topic “SNS activity in health and disease—advances with microne...

Multilayer thin films consisting of anionic R-zirconium phosphate (R-ZrP) sheets, tetrameric zirconium hydroxide cations [Zr4(OH)8(H2O)16] (Zr4), and alkanediylbis(phosphonic acid) (CnBPA) have been grown on silicon and gold surfaces by sequential adsorption reactions. The thin films were characterized by ellipsometry, X-ray diffraction, reflectance infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron sp...

Sir, We read with great interest the article by Mencacci and colleagues (2014) reporting a significantly higher frequency of GTP cyclohydrolase 1 (GCH1) variants in patients with Parkinson’s disease compared to controls. Whole-exome sequencing of a large case-control cohort showed that rare GCH1 coding variants are associated with a 7-fold increased risk of Parkinson’s disease. Heterozygous los...