“…However, whether other members of the AP-1 transcription factors play a role in the regulation of NOS3 expression in UAEC also needs to be investigated. Furthermore, the AP-1 family oncogene products can be rapidly induced by a variety of physiological and pathophysiological stimuli important for cell function, including hormones such as estrogen (Shiozawa et al, 2004), growth factors (Inoue et al, 1995;Zheng et al, 1999), shear stress (Li et al, 2003), protein kinase C activators (Navarro-Antolin et al, 2000), tumor necrosis factor-α (Hanazawa et al, 1994), lipopolysaccharide (Schwartz et al, 1997;Wong et al, 2004), and angiotensin II (Clark et al, 1992). In the uterine and placental circulations, the role of AP-1 in estrogen (Chen et al, 2006;Weiner et al, 1994) and angiogenic growth factors such as basic fibroblast growth factor (Zheng et al, 1999) as well as angiotensin II (Zheng et al, 2005) stimulation of endothelial NOS3 expression is currently unknown, which will be important to be investigated because of the key role(s) that these factors play in the regulation of uterine and placental vascular activity and reactivity during pregnancy.…”