Nonspecific effects of the pharmacological probes commonly used to analyze signal transduction in rabbit parietal cells

In order to examine some possibly misleading conclusions of the pharmacological analysis of the signal transduction pathways of gastric acid secretion, we evaluated various agents including inhibitors of protein kinase C, cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase, phospholipase C, phospholipase A2, lipoxygenase, casein kinase, calmodulin, myosin light chain kinase, tyrosine kinase, anion exchanger, and protein phosphatase; and activators of protein kinase C. Among them, the cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase inhibitor N-[2-(p-bromocinnamylamino)ethyl]-5-isoquinolinylsulfonamide (H-89), the phospholipase A2 inhibitor 2-(p-amylcinnamoyl)amino-4-chlorobenzoic acid (ONO-RS-082), three myosin light chain kinase inhibitors (1-(5-iodonaphthalene-1-sulfonyl)-1H-hexahydro-1,4-diazepine (ML-7), 1-(5-chloronaphthalene-1-sulfonyl)-1H-hexahydro-1,4-diazepine (ML-9), and wortmannin), the anion exchanger inhibitor 4,4'-diisothiocyanatostilbene-2,2'-disulfonic acid (DIDS), the phospholipase C inhibitor neomycin, and most known calmodulin antagonists strongly inhibited [14C]aminopyrine accumulation, an indicator of acid secretion, in isolated rabbit gastric glands stimulated by N6,2'-O-dibutyryl-cyclic AMP. ONO-RS-082, calmidazolium, and DIDS inhibited H+,K+-ATPase. Most of the chemicals with antisecretory activity showed protonophore-like activity in gastric microsomes as well as in the mitochondria. It is concluded that H-89, ONO-RS-082, ML-7, ML-9, neomycin, and all calmodulin antagonists tested so far should not be used as tools to analyze gastric acid secretion.     

Highly available network design and resource management of SINET4

The Japanese academic backbone network has been providing a variety of multilayer network services to support a wide range of research and education activities for more than 700 universities and research institutions. The new version, called SINET4, was launched in 2011 in order to enhance the service availability and the network bandwidth as well as to expand the service menu. Its enhanced service availability was unexpectedly verified by the disastrous March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, when the network managed not to stop service operation even after the earthquake. This paper describes the design and implementation of SINET4 in terms of multiple service provision, network resource control and management, and high reliability from physical level to network management level. The impacts of the huge earthquake are also reported.     

High-voltage (>1 kV) SiC Schottky barrier diodes with lowon-resistances

Au/6H-SiC Schottky barrier diodes with high blocking voltages were fabricated using layers grown by step-controlled epitaxy. A breakdown voltage of over 1100 V was achieved for silicon carbide (SIC) Schottky barrier diodes. These high-voltage SIC rectifiers had specific on-resistances lower than the theoretical limits of Si rectifiers by more than one order of magnitude. The specific on-resistance increased with temperature according to a T^2.0 dependence. The diodes showed good characteristics at temperatures as high as 400°C     

Impact of QoS operations on an experimental testbed network

By making the best use of limited bandwidth, quality of service (QoS) provisioning over internet is essential for satisfying various types of internet-application requirements. The traffic classification and scheduling are the key functions to provide various kinds of class of service (CoS) under an overload condition. This paper investigates QoS performance in a network equipment testbed when implementing these main functions. We examine the major CoS functions provided by the Juniper T320 router, and measure their performance. In addition to fundamental analysis of the QoS behavior, we show the impact of QoS operations on a parallel system distributed in multi-domain networks as a practical case study of grid environments.     

The guard-ring termination for the high-voltage SiC Schottkybarrier diodes

In this report, we propose the guard-ring structure as the edge termination for the high-voltage SiC Schottky barrier diodes. The local oxidation process is used to form the mesa of a p-n junction as the guard-ring. The comparison between the Al/Ti Schottky barrier diodes with and without the guard-ring indicates the effectiveness of the guard-ring to relax the electric field, from the results that the breakdown voltage is about two times larger with high yield     

Rerouting network: a high-performance self-routing switch forB-ISDN

A high-performance self-routing switch is proposed for ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) switch systems. Switching performance is enhanced by a rerouting algorithm applied to a particular multistage interconnection algorithm. The interconnection algorithm offers many access points to the output and resolves output contention by layering buffers at each switching stage. The author analyzes switching performance and shows that this switch can be easily engineered to have high throughput and low cell loss probability by increasing the number of switching stages. The author also illustrates that the number of switching stages required for a given cell loss probability shows gradual growth with increasing switch size. Analysis shows that the proposed switch is robust even with respect to nonuniform traffic     

Design of versatile academic infrastructure for multilayer network services

This paper describes the network design and configurations of the new Japanese academic infrastructure, called SINET3, which provides a rich variety of network services to more than 700 universities and research institutions. Since the start of full-scale operations in June 2007, the network has expanded its services to include multi-layer transfer services (IP, Ethernet, and layer-1), enriched virtual private network services (L3VPN, L2VPN, VPLS, and L1VPN), enhanced QoS services (packet-based and circuit-based), and brand-new layer-1 bandwidth-on-demand (BoD) services. This paper explains how the network provides these various network services on a single network platform by effectively configuring leading-edge networking components, such as high-performance IP routers, layer- 1 switches, and a BoD server. Evaluations of the network design and configurations confirmed that the networking functions were effectively coordinated. The procedures and techniques related to the configuration validation that covered all phases of the network design and construction are also presented.     

Single tag scheme for segment routing in software-defined network

This paper proposes a scheme to reduce a size of a packet header for a segment routing (SR) scheme in a software-defined network (SDN). The SR scheme inserts a segment identification (SID) list into the packet header to indicate a path for the source–destination pair of the packet. The path can be split into different segments to suit the service requirement and the segments are carried by the SID-list whose length increases with the number of segments. This also increases the packet overhead, and an additional packet is needed if the packet length exceeds the maximum transmission unit (MTU). Moreover, it may not be possible to implement SR in SDN due to the limited number of stacked labels provided by the switch vendor. In the proposed scheme, the SID-list is replaced by a single tag to indicate a node edge, called a swapping node. The tag is replaced by a new tag at the swapping node. With this scheme, the size of SID-list is fixed and does not vary with the number of segments, and no additional packets are required. A mathematic model to balance the number of flow entries in each swapping node is introduced by minimizing the maximum number of flow entries in each swapping node over the network. We implement the proposed scheme on the transmission-Japan science information network (SINET5) and demonstrate confirms its functionality.

     

Translocation of HSP27 to cytoskeleton by repetitive hypoxia-reoxygenation in the rat myoblast cell line, H9c2

Off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting requires immobilization of the coronary artery. A suction device (Octopus Tissue Stabilizer), attached to the epicardium and connected rigidly to the operating table rail, was used through limited and full surgical access for single-vessel and multivessel arterial revascularization, respectively. An outline for its application, as used by us to construct 122 anastomoses in 70 patients, including posterior wall grafting (in 9 patients) and sequential grafting on the anterior wall (in 17 patients), is presented.