A Functional View of Smooth Muscle

The idea of this volume was to provide for advanced graduate students, medical students, and postdoctoral who are beginning to do research related to smooth muscle a sampling of the orienting ideas of the researchers working on problems in smooth muscle physiology and pathophysiology.

Therefore, an essential goal of the volume is to identify the lines of investigation that are currently being pursued by investigators whose concerns are with smooth muscle or with organs with parenchumal tissues consisting of smooth muscle.

Various types of smooth muscle constitute the parenchuma or characteristic tissues of a large number of organs or regions of organs.

In each case, the phenotype is distinctly different and, while smooth muscles do not exhibit the diversity of epithelia, they nevertheless span a great range of physiological responsiveness.

Undoubtedly, the variations in the characteristic responses of different smooth muscles result from the expression of sets of transduction subserving proteins.

However, it is what the sets are and how they work and are regulated that fascinated the physiologist.

In this book, the contrast between sameness and diversity recurs as a theme.