“…At the cellular level, there is growing evidence that for some agonists, such as acetylcholine, histamine, and bradykinin (Peach, 1985;Moncada et al, 1997;Kamata and Nakajima, 1998), a rise in intracellular Ca 2+ is necessary for NO production. In contrast, with other forms of stimuli, such as fluid shear stress (Kuchan and Frangos, 1994), estrogen (Caulin-Glaser et al, 1997), and insulin/IGF (Tsukahara et al, 1994), a rise in Ca 2+ is not required for NO production. Many stimuli [including insulin, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), β-agonists, adrenomedullin and shear-stress signals] have been reported to regulate NO production by phosphlylation of eNOS, which facilitates association of the enzyme with calmodulin, thus reducing its inhibitory interaction with caveolin-1 (Dimmeler et al, 1999;Fulton et al, 1999, Zeng et al, 2000Luo et al, 2000;Nishimatu et al, 2001).…”