Vascular Remodeling in Health and Disease

The term vascular remodeling is commonly used to define the structural changes in blood vessel geometry that occur in response to long-term physiologic alterations in blood flow or in response to vessel wall injury brought about by trauma or underlying cardiovascular diseases.1, 2, 3, 4 The process of remodeling, which begins as an adaptive response to long-term hemodynamic alterations such as elevated shear stress or increased intravascular pressure, may eventually become maladaptive, leading to impaired vascular function. The vascular endothelium, owing to its location lining the lumen of blood vessels, plays a pivotal role in regulation of all aspects of vascular function and homeostasis.5 Thus, not surprisingly, endothelial dysfunction has been recognized as the harbinger of all major cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, and diabetes.6, 7, 8 The endothelium elaborates a variety of substances that influence vascular tone and protect the vessel wall against inflammatory cell adhesion, thrombus formation, and vascular cell proliferation.8, 9, 10 Among the primary biologic mediators emanating from the endothelium is nitric oxide (NO) and the arachidonic acid metabolite prostacyclin [prostaglandin I2 (PGI2)], which exert powerful vasodilatory, antiadhesive, and antiproliferative effects in the vessel wall

Heterogeneity of lipoprotein B

Combined very low and low density lipoproteins were derived from human plasma by polyanion precipitation and the low density lipoprotein fraction (density 1.027-1.050 g/ml) was isolated by sequential ultracentrifugation. When this fraction was applied to Sepharose column chromatography, three lipoproteins were eluted. The first and third peaks were minor components while the second peak represented the bulk of LDL. Further chromatographic and electrophoretic studies indicated that the component representing the second peak was heterogeneous. This component was subsequently delipidated at pH 4 in a quaternary biphasic solvent system. The apoproteins remained soluble after delipidation and were treated with various deaggregating agents. On column isoelectric focusing in the presence of 4 M urea the apoproteins banded as broad overlapping peaks between pH 3 and 7. When hexanol was added to the system, distinct apoprotein subfractions were resolved

Noh performance of Yumi Yawata

Paper and PresentationThis paper presents new software speed records for AES-128 encryption for architectures at both ends of the performance spectrum. On the one side we target the low-end 8-bit AVR microcontrollers and 32-bit ARM microprocessors, while on the other side of the spectrum we consider the high-performing Cell broadband engine and NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs). Platform specifi c techniques are detailed, explaining how the software speed records on these architectures are obtained. Additionally, this paper presents the first AES decryption implementation for GPU architectures