Protective Effect of Erythromycin Pre-adaptation on Focal Cerebral Ischemia in Rats and its Changes in TNF-α and nNOS.

Context: Ischemic stroke accounts for 85% of all types of stroke. Ischemic preconditioning can provide protection against cerebral ischemic injury. Erythromycin can induce ischemic preconditioning in brain tissue.

Bistable insulin response: The win-win solution for glycemic control.

To satisfy both the safety and rapidity of glycemic control, muscles' insulin response must be bistable, as theoretically predicted. Here, we test the bistability hypothesis by combining cellular experiments (to measure the threshold values ) with mathematical modeling (to test the relevance of bistability ). We examine bistability in C2C12 myotubes by both single-cell analysis (Fӧrster resonance energy transfer) and cultured cells analysis (immunoblot).