“…In addition, sarafotoxin, a selective ET B receptor agonist (Heyl et al, 1993; Williams et al, 1991), did not induce relaxations in arteries transduced with AdCMVeNOS, suggesting that activation of ET A receptors located on the vascular adventitia is involved in the relaxations to ET-1 and ET-2. This concept is further supported by the present results showing that BQ-123, a selective ET A receptor antagonist (Douglas, Meek and Ohlstein, 1994; Ihara et al, 1995), almost abolished ET-1-induced relaxations, whereas BQ-788, a selective ET B receptor antagonist (Ishikawa et al, 1994; Karaki, Sudjarwo and Hori, 1994) was without effect. In our previous ex vivo and in vivo gene transfer studies on canine cerebral arteries, electron microscopy immunogold labeling indicated that expression of recombinant eNOS protein was localized to adventitial fibroblasts (Chen et al, 1997 a ; Tsutsui et al, 1998).…”