A covalent regulatory mechanism involving Ca(2+)-dependent cross-bridge phosphorylation determines both the number of cycling cross bridges and cycling kinetics in mammalian smooth muscle. Our objective was to determine whether a similar regulatory mechanism governed smooth muscle contraction from a poikilothermic amphibian in a test of the hypothesis that myosin regulatory light chain (MRLC) p...

background: bone marrow-derived mesenchymal cellscan transdifferentiate into cardiomyocyte cells and improveheart function after transplantation. since biomaterials canimprove the cell retention in the site, cell survival and differentiation,heart tissue engineering is now being explored as anapplied solution to support cell-based therapies and increasetheir efficacy for myocardial diseases. ch...

background abnormalities in the velocity and pattern of myocardial shortening on tissue doppler imaging (tdi) have been proposed to aid in the noninvasive diagnosis of coronary artery disease (cad). objectives we investigated the diagnostic value of post-systolic shortening (pss), a delayed ejection velocity of the myocardium after the closure of the aortic valve, on tdi in the diagnosis of cad...

Background:  There is no consensus on the best surgical treatment in Kienböck disease. We compared the shortterm outcomes of radial shortening osteotomy and capitate shortening osteotomy in patients affected with this disease.  Methods:  In a retrospective study of 21 patients with Lichtman stage IIIA of Kienböck disease, 12 patients with an average follow up of 3.2 ± 0.6 years had radial short...

background: limited resources for adult stem cells necessitate their in vitro culture prior to clinical use. investigating mitochondrial dna (mtdna) and telomere shortening has proved to be important indications of stem cell validity. this study was designed to investigate these indicators in multiple passages of three adult stem cell lines which were produced in our stem cell laboratory. metho...

BACKGROUND Telomere/telomerase system has been recently recognized as an attractive target for anticancer therapy. Telomerase inhibition results in tumor regression and increased sensitivity to various cytotoxic drugs. However, it has not been fully established yet whether the mediator of these effects is telomerase inhibition per se or telomere shortening resulting from inhibition of telomeras...

PURPOSE In ischemic myocardium systolic strain is reduced and followed by a deformation after systole, the so-called post-systolic shortening. The presence of post systolic shortening is therefore considered a marker of viability even though its mechanism remains unclear. The hypothesis was tested whether post-systolic shortening might be a passive recoil phenomenon and therefore not uniquely a...

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between compensatory shortening and coarticulation in German tense and lax vowels in trochees and iambs and to determine whether this relationship was influenced by prosodic accentuation. Speakers produced near minimal pairs differing in vowel tensity in monosyllabic and disyllabic words (both trochees and iambs) in accented and deaccent...

This study investigates whether the stress foot is a planned timing unit in American English, by examining the durational characteristics of the foot in three different prosodic contexts i) within an intermediate phrase, ii) across an intermediate phrase and iii) across an intonational phrase. The results show that as the number of syllables in a foot increases, the duration of the foot increas...