The thiazolidenediones (TZDs) are commonly used to treat hyperglycemia in type 2 diabetes. Diabetes is associated with macrovascular disease, leading to accelerated atherosclerosis caused by aberrant vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cell proliferation. Although VSM cell proliferation is inhibited by the TZDs, the mechanism of this effect has not been established. Because of reports that the cyclin ...

This paper describes our attempt to combine the relative merits of different indexing units (scales) and different retrieval models to improve performance in Chinese spoken document retrieval. Our study includes indexing units from three scales: words, character bigrams and syllable bigrams. We also include two different retrieval models: the HMM-based model and the vector space model (VSM). Ou...

There are at least two kinds of similarity. Relational similarity is correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity, which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their relations are analogous. For examp...

People are generating more and more short texts. There is an urgent demand to classify short texts into different domains. Due to the shortness and sparseness of short texts, conventional methods based on Vector Space Model (VSM) have limitations. To tackle the data scarcity problem, we propose a new model to directly measure the correlation between a short text instance and a domain instead of...

House SJ, Ginnan RG, Armstrong SE, Singer HA. Calcium/ calmodulin-dependent protein kinase IIisoform regulation of vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol 292: C2276–C2287, 2007. First published January 31, 2007; doi:10.1152/ajpcell.00606.2006.—There is accumulating evidence that Ca -dependent signaling pathways regulate proliferation and migration of vascular smoot...

Abnormal vascular smooth muscle (VSM) growth is central in the pathophysiology of vascular disease yet fully effective therapies to curb this growth are lacking. Recent findings from our lab and others support growth control of VSM by adenosine monophosphate (AMP)-based approaches including the metabolic sensor AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA). Molecul...

There is accumulating evidence that Ca(2+)-dependent signaling pathways regulate proliferation and migration of vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cells, contributing to the intimal accumulation of VSM that is a hallmark of many vascular diseases. In this study we investigated the role of the multifunctional serine/threonine kinase, calmodulin (CaM)-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII), as a mediator...

We have investigated the requirement for c-myc downregulation in the growth arrest of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs). Rat VSMCs were infected with a retrovirus vector directing constitutive expression of either the complete human c-Myc protein (VSM-myc cells) or the c-Myc deletion mutant D106-143, which is inactive in cotransformation and autosuppression assays (VSM-D106-143 myc cells). C...

Despite our understanding that medial smooth muscle hypertrophy is a central feature of vascular remodeling, the molecular pathways underlying this pathology are still not well understood. Work over the past decade has illustrated a potential role for the multifunctional calmodulin-dependent kinase CaMKII in smooth muscle cell contraction, growth, and migration. Here we demonstrate that CaMKII ...

Here we report exquisitely distinct material properties of primary vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cells isolated from the thoracic aorta of adult (8 months) vs. aged (30 months) F344XBN rats. Individual VSM cells derived from the aged animals showed a tense internal network of the actin cytoskeleton (CSK), exhibiting increased stiffness (elastic) and frictional (loss) moduli than those derived fr...