Carrington, G., Zahedi, M. and Peckham, M. orcid.org/0000-0002-3754-2028 (2026) Smooth muscle contractile cytoskeleton in health and disease. Journal of Muscle Research and Cell Motility, 47 (2). 13. ISSN: 0142-4319
Abstract
Smooth muscle cells are widespread in the human body, found in a range of tissues from the vasculature to the gut, airways, bladder and so on. They can be found as isolated cells or organised into syncytia (groups of cells). The organisation of the contractile cytoskeleton (smooth muscle actin and myosin filaments) is less well understood than that of striated (cardiac and skeletal) muscle. This review aims to explore what is known, the potential effects of mutations in smooth muscle actin, myosin and tropomyosin and how they lead to disease, and to highlight what we have still to learn about the smooth muscle contractile cytoskeleton.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Authors/Creators: |
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| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Smooth Muscle; Cytoskeleton Actin; Myosin; Caldesmon; Calponin |
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | The University of Leeds |
| Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Molecular and Cellular Biology (Leeds) |
| Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Wellcome Trust 223125/Z/21/Z |
| Date Deposited: | 21 Apr 2026 10:32 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Jun 2026 15:21 |
| Status: | Published |
| Publisher: | Springer |
| Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10974-026-09731-4 |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:240234 |
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