Barnacles are one of the most common organisms in intertidal areas. Their life cycle includes seven free-swimming larval stages and sessile juvenile and adult stages. The transition from the swimming to the sessile stages, referred to as larval settlement, is crucial for their survivor success and subsequent population distribution. In this study, we focused on the involvement of calmodulin (Ca...

OBJECTIVE To determine the role of asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) in acute lung injury induced by cerebral ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury in rats. METHODS Adult male SD rats were randomly divided into 4 groups, namely the sham-operated group (S), cerebral I/R model group, ADMA+I/R group, and dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolase (DDAH)+I/R group. In the latter 3 groups, acute lung in...

Possible involvement of reversible phosphorylation and dephosphorylation of myosin light chain (MLC) by myosin light chain kinase (MLCK) and protein phosphatases (PPases), respectively, in the Ca++-calmodulin-dependent inhibition of renin secretion was investigated with the use of putative MLCK inhibitor ML-7 [1-(5-iodonaphthalene-1-sulfonyl)-1H-hexahydro-1,4-diazepine] and PPase type1 (PPase-1...

BACKGROUND Bowel obstruction is a common cause of abdominal emergency, since the patients are at increased risk of septicemia resulting in high mortality rate. While the compartmentalized changes in enteric microfloral population and augmentation of bacterial translocation (BT) have already been reported using experimental obstruction models, alterations in epithelial permeability of the obstru...

It is generally recognized that ventricular myosin regulatory light chains (RLC) are approximately 40% phosphorylated under basal conditions, and there is little change in RLC phosphorylation with agonist stimulation of myocardium or altered stimulation frequency. To establish the functional consequences of basal RLC phosphorylation in the heart, we measured mechanical properties of rat skinned...

Shape change is the earliest response of platelets to stimuli; it is mainly dependent upon Ca(2+)/calmodulin interaction subsequent to Ca(2+) mobilization and is mediated by myosin light chain kinase (MLCK) activation. It has been recently suggested that collagen itself is not able to elicit platelet shape change in the absence of ADP and thromboxane A(2) costimulation but is capable of inducin...

In This Issue In This Issue Monitoring MLCK yosin light chain kinase (MLCK) is a busy protein— it phosphorylates myosin's regulatory light chain (and thus activates myosin) during nonmuscle cell contraction, cytokinesis, stress fiber formation, and motility. In general, MLCK is known to be present at the cellular sites implicated in these events, but the results of Chew et al. (page 543) are so...

Recent studies suggest that vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) can modulate smooth muscle phenotype and, consequently, the composition and function of arteries upstream from the microcirculation, where angiogenesis occurs. Given that hypoxia potently induces VEGF, the present study explores the hypothesis that, in fetal arteries, VEGF contributes to hypoxic vascular remodeling through ch...

Cells polarize to a single front and rear to achieve rapid actin-based motility, but the mechanisms preventing the formation of multiple fronts are unclear. We developed embryonic zebrafish keratocytes as a model system for investigating establishment of a single axis. We observed that, although keratocytes from 2 d postfertilization (dpf) embryos resembled canonical fan-shaped keratocytes, ker...

The mylk1 gene is a large gene spanning approximately 250 kb and comprising at least 31 exons. The mylk1 gene encodes at least four protein products: two isoforms of the 220-kDa myosin light chain kinase (MLCK), a 130-kDa MLCK, and telokin. Transcripts encoding these products are derived from four independent promoters within the mylk1 gene. The kinases expressed from the mylk1 gene have been e...