Our major objective in this study was to examine the hypothesis that the aortic smooth muscle cell hypertrophy and hyperploidy observed in previous studies of spontaneously hypertensive rats is not peculiar to that model, but also occurs in Sprague-Dawley rats made hypertensive by a Goldblatt procedure (two-kidney, one-clip model). Flow microfluorometric and microdensitometric analysis of smoot...

Smooth muscle cell containing organs (bladder, heart, blood vessels) are damaged by a variety of pathological conditions necessitating surgery or organ replacement. Currently, regeneration of contractile tissues is hampered by lack of functional smooth muscle cells. Multipotent skin derived progenitor cells (SKPs) can easily be isolated from adult skin and can be differentiated in vitro into co...

C ellular plasticity has become the subject of intense research, with perhaps the greatest example provided by the recent Nobel Prize winners Drs Yamananka and Gurdon and the demonstration that terminally differentiated fibro-blasts can be coaxed into assuming an embryonic stem cell-like fate. Emerging evidence suggests that plasticity inherent in cells may be hijacked in the progression of dis...

Undifferentiated embryonic mesenchymal cells are round/cuboidal in shape. During development, visceral myogenesis is shortly preceded by mesenchymal cell elongation. To determine the role of the cell's shape on smooth muscle development, undifferentiated embryonic mesenchymal cells from intestine (abundant visceral muscle), lung (some visceral muscle) or kidney (no visceral muscle) were plated ...

TEF and RTEF-1 Binding to the Smooth Muscle -Actin Gene Distinguishes Myofibroblasts and Adult Smooth Muscle Cells Adult smooth muscle cells are highly plastic and can exhibit a range of phenotypes in response to different environmental and developmental cues. Their phenotypes can range from quiescent highly contractile cells with high levels of characteristic contractile protein isoforms, to h...

The Serum Response Factor (SRF) coactivator myocardin stimulates the transcription of multiple muscle genes during cardiac and smooth muscle development. Mouse embryos lacking myocardin die during the earliest stages of smooth muscle development and fail to express multiple smooth muscle marker genes in the embryonic dorsal aorta and other vascular structures. In this study, we used mutant embr...

Using cultured cells from bovine and rat aortas, we have examined the possibility that endothelial cells might regulate the growth of vascular smooth muscle cells. Conditioned medium from confluent bovine aortic endothelial cells inhibited the proliferation of growth-arrested smooth muscle cells. Conditioned medium from exponential endothelial cells, and from exponential or confluent smooth mus...

The structure of the smooth muscle tissue is quite different from that of other muscle tissue subtypes. The primary smooth muscle structural and functional unit – the smooth muscle myocyte (Myocytus nonstriatus) has unique structure, arrangement and innervation. The spindle shape of the mononucleated smooth muscle cell permits a close contact among cells in the splanchnic and vascular walls. Re...