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Purpose A specific therapeutic strategy in sepsis-induced myocardial dysfunction remains to be determined. Nitrite may have cardioprotective effects against sepsis-induced myocardial dysfunction. This study investigated the cardioprotective effects of nitrite on myocardial function, mitochondrial bioenergetics, and its underlying molecular mechanisms in severe septic rats. Methods Sepsis was induced in male Wistar rats by cecal ligation and puncture (CLP). After CLP, we administered normal saline (NS group) or nitrite (nitrite group) subcutaneously. We administered nitrite at different doses (0.1-10 mg/kg) to ascertain the most effective dose and examined cardiac function in an isolated heart experiment 8 h after CLP. We investigated mitochondrial bioenergetics and molecular mechanisms underlying the administration of nitrite in vitro. Results In isolated heart experiments, the left ventricular developed pressure (96 ± 5 mmHg) at a moderate nitrite dose (1.0 mg/kg) was significantly higher than that in the NS group (75 ± 4 mmHg, P < 0.05). Mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation in the nitrite group was significantly higher than that in the NS group (P < 0.01). Immunoblotting revealed that nitrite significantly increased the phosphorylation of Akt (P < 0.05) and reduced the nuclear translocation of NF-[kappa]B (P < 0.05) compared with the NS group. Nitrite was also shown to improve the rate of survival in severe septic rats (P < 0.001). Conclusions Our results showed that a moderate nitrite dose improved septic myocardial dysfunction at organ, cellular, and molecular levels via modulation of stress signal responses, which resulted in an improvement in survival., Author(s): Ryoichi Kawaguchi [sup.1] , Naoyuki Hirata [sup.1] , Yasuyuki Tokinaga [sup.1] , Shunsuke Hayashi [sup.1] , Shigeaki Inoue [sup.2] , Nobuo Watanabe [sup.2] , Michiaki Yamakage [sup.1] Author Affiliations: [...]

Consider a multiuser communication system in a frequency selective environment whereby users share a common spectrum and can interfere with each other. Assuming Gaussian signaling and no interference cancelation, we study optimal spectrum sharing strategies for the maximization of sum-rate under separate power constraints for individual users. Since the sum-rate function is nonconcave in terms of the users' power allocations, there can be multiple local maxima for the sum-rate maximization problem in general. In this paper, we show that, if the normalized crosstalk coefficients are larger than a given threshold (roughly equal to 1/2), then the optimal spectrum sharing strategy is frequency division multiple access (FDMA). In case of arbitrary positive crosstalk coefficients, if each user's power budget exceeds a given threshold, then FDMA is again sum-rate optimal, at least in a local sense. In addition, we show that the problem of finding the optimal FDMA spectrum allocation is NP-hard, implying that the general problem of maximizing sum-rate is also NP-hard, even in the case of two users. We also propose several simple distributed spectrum allocation algorithms that can approximately maximize sum-rates. Numerical results indicate that these algorithms are efficient and can achieve substantially larger sum-rates than the existing Iterative Waterfilling solutions, either in an interference-rich environment or when the users' power budgets are sufficiently high. Index Terms--Frequency-division multiple-access (FDMA) optimality, multiuser communication system, spectrum management, sum-rate maximization.

Research has been conducted on the heme oxygenase. The crystallization of rat heme oxygenase has been examined and the results of its three-dimensional structure are reported.