Biology of Vascular Smooth Muscle

This book provides a concise yet comprehensive review of the morphological, biochemical, electrical, mechanical, and metabolic properties of vascular smooth muscle, the regulation of vascular activities and the intracellular signaling involved. It particularly focuses on recently identified vasoactive agents, enzymes and transduction mechanisms.

by Chi-ming Hai (Author)

This book offers a wide range of topics such as stem cells, cell culture, biomaterials, epigenetics, therapeutics, and the creation of tissues and organs. Novel applications for cell and tissue engineering including cell therapy, tissue models, and disease pathology modeling are discussed. The book also deals with the functional role of autophagy in modulating muscle homeostasis and molecular mechanism regulating skeletal muscle mass.

This book deals with current progress and perspectives in a variety of topics on the skeletal and smooth muscle, stem cells, regeneration, disease or therapeutics. The book can be interesting for graduate students, teachers, physicians, executives and researchers in the field of molecular biology and regenerative medicine.

The goal of this book is to consolidate the recent advances in the area of muscle biology/diseases/regeneration covering a broad range of interrelated topics in a timely fashion and to disseminate that knowledge in a lucid way to a greater scientific audience. This book will prove highly useful for students, researchers, and clinicians in muscle cell biology, exercise physiology/science, stem cell biology, developmental biology, cancer biology, pathology, oncology, as well as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Potassium channels (K+) are membrane-spanning proteins which serve many important functions and are becoming a hot topic in physiology. K+ channels determine or modulate many functions of vascular smooth muscle, endothelial and inflammatory cells, and thus are central to regulation of arterial tone and control of cell proliferation. They are also promising targets for antihypertensive treatments with drugs which open and close specific types of K+ channels, making for an active field of research. With their ability to control vascular tone, voltage-gated K+ channels play a significant role in both pulmonary and systemic hypertension as well as in cardiac arrhythmias. This book will highlight the latest discoveries by leading researchers pertaining to the role of K+ channels in the heart and blood vessels in normal physiology and a variety of disease states.