Intoxications with succinylcholine (SUX) lead to a potentially lethal respiratory paralysis, and forensic cases involving accidental or deliberate SUX-application have been reported. Detection of SUX as well as its metabolite succinylmonocholine (SMC) is difficult: both substances are analytically challenging, and the extremely short plasma half-life of SUX additionally hampers detection of the...

Yang B, Gwozdz T, Dutko-Gwozdz J, Bolotina VM. Orai1 and Ca -independent phospholipase A2 are required for store-operated Icat-SOC current, Ca entry, and proliferation of primary vascular smooth muscle cells. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol 302: C748–C756, 2012. First published November 16, 2011; doi:10.1152/ajpcell.00312.2011.—Storeoperated Ca entry (SOCE) is important for multiple functions of vasc...

OBJECTIVES We hypothesized that redox-mediated apoptosis of medial smooth muscle cells (SMC) during the acute phase of vascular injury contributes to the pathophysiology of vascular disease. METHODS Apoptosis of medial SMC (1-14 days following balloon injury) was identified in rat carotid arteries by in situ DNA labeling. NADPH-derived superoxide and expression of Bcl-xL, Bax, caspase-3 and c...

The infrared emission from interstellar dust in the Small Magellanic Cloud is modeled using a mixture of amorphous silicate and carbonaceous grains, including a population of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules. We show the following: (1) This dust model is able to reproduce the spectral energy distribution from near-IR to far-IR for the entire SMC Bar region, provided that the PAH ...

Objective. To evaluate safety and efficacy of intravenous ferric carboxymaltose (FCM) versus standard medical care (SMC) for iron-deficiency anemia (IDA) in postpartum women and women with heavy menstrual bleeding. Study Design. This open-label, multicenter study randomized women with IDA (hemoglobin ≤ 11.0 g/dL) to single doses of FCM (15 mg/kg [maximum 1000 mg]) or SMC (this treatment was det...

RATIONALE Nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor (Nrf)3, a member of the cap 'N' collar family of transcription factors that bind to the DNA-antioxidant responsive elements, is involved in reactive oxygen species balancing and in muscle precursor migration during early embryo development. OBJECTIVE To investigate the functional role of Nrf3 in smooth muscle cell (SMC) differentiation in vi...

In this paper, we have exploited the first-order sliding mode control method to track the ECG data of the human heart by three different nonlinear control laws. In order to lessen the intrinsic chattering of the classic sliding mode control system, smooth function approximations of the control input, by means of the hyperbolic tangent and the saturation function, were used. The fast Fourier tra...

Vascular smooth muscle cell (SMC) differentiation is an important process in vasculogenesis and angiogenesis during embryonic development. The alterations in the differentiated state in SMCs contribute to a variety of major cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis, hypertension, restenosis and vascular aneurysm [1-2] . A better understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that ...

More than a dozen microlensing events have been detected so far towards the LMC and 2 towards the SMC. If all the lenses are in the Galactic halo, both the LMC and the SMC events are expected to have similar time scales. However, the first event towards the SMC, MACHO 97-SMC-1, had a time scale of 123 days which is much larger than the typical time scale for the LMC events. Since the observed t...

Carbon monoxide (CO) is a vasoactive molecule that is generated by vascular cells as a byproduct of heme catabolism and it plays an important physiological role in circulation system. In order to investigate whether exogenous CO can mediate the growth and proliferation of vascular cells, in this study, we used 250 parts per million (ppm) of CO to treat human umbilical artery smooth muscle cell ...