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Smooth muscle-containing tissue needs to be stretched often, so elasticity is an important attribute of smooth muscle. Smooth muscle cells may secrete a complex extracellular matrix containing collagen (predominantly types I and III), elastin, glycoproteins, and proteoglycans. Smooth muscle also has specific elastin and collagen receptors to ...
Vascular smooth muscle cells also play important roles during development, e.g. driving osteocyte differentiation from undifferentiated precursors during osteogenesis. [1] Arteries have a great deal more smooth muscle within their walls than veins, thus their greater wall thickness. This is because they have to carry pumped blood away from the ...
Smooth muscle tissue is non-striated and involuntary. Smooth muscle is found within the walls of organs and structures such as the esophagus, stomach, intestines, bronchi, uterus, urethra, bladder, blood vessels, and the arrector pili in the skin that control the erection of body hair.
The majority of this type of muscle tissue is found in the digestive and urinary systems where it acts by propelling forward food, chyme, and feces in the former and urine in the latter. Other places smooth muscle can be found are within the uterus, where it helps facilitate birth, and the eye, where the pupillary sphincter controls pupil size. [3]
In the skin, smooth muscle cells such as those of the arrector pili cause hair to stand erect in response to cold temperature or fear. [19] Smooth muscle cells are spindle-shaped with wide middles, and tapering ends. They have a single nucleus and range from 30 to 200 micrometers in length. This is thousands of times shorter than skeletal ...
The submucosa (or tela submucosa) is a thin layer of tissue in various organs of the gastrointestinal, respiratory, and genitourinary tracts. It is the layer of dense irregular connective tissue that supports the mucosa (mucous membrane) and joins it to the muscular layer, the bulk of overlying smooth muscle (fibers running circularly within layer of longitudinal muscle).
The muscle fiber cells are arranged in 5 to 7 layers of circular and longitudinal smooth muscle with about 50μ in length and contain well-marked, rod-shaped nuclei, which are often slightly curved. Separating the tunica media from the outer tunica externa in larger arteries is the external elastic membrane (also called the external elastic ...
The body contains three types of muscle tissue: (a) skeletal muscle, (b) smooth muscle, and (c) cardiac muscle. On the anterior and posterior views of the muscular system above, superficial muscles (those at the surface) are shown on the right side of the body while deep muscles (those underneath the superficial muscles) are shown on the left ...