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duodenum.
And here, here we have to relax the muscle
in order to allow materials to pass from
one compartment to another.
In addition to this, though, we also have
smooth muscle sitting around blood
vessels, and in the body this, they have a
certain tone, or certain toneness, that,
that's a basal state.
They can contract further down and
decrease the diameter of the blood vessel,
or they can relax and then allow the blood
vessel to increase in the lumen size to
increase.
This ability to have in a, sort of an
variable amount of contraction state is a
property of the tonic types of smooth
muscle.
The other type of muscle that we see, is a
phasic type of a contraction.
And that is, is that you stimulate the
smooth muscle, it contracts and then it
will relax when we remove calcium.
Smooth muscle also has a very variable
type of regulation and it can have both
positive and negative regulation.
So remember in striated muscle, skeletal
muscle.
Whenever we activated the neuromuscular
junction it was always, always excitatory.
In this case, the smooth muscle can either
be inhibited, because it's relaxed, or we
can cause it to contract.
And it's the net effect of all of these
different impinging factors on the smooth
muscle that dictates its actual contracted
state.
We have, in some smooth muscles we have
what are called mechanically gated
channels, and this is simply that these
are stretch channels.
So if we have on our blood vessel, we have
these this type of channel.
And if we increase the amount of blood
that's flowing through that vessel, we
will stretch the smooth muscle of the
walls and that will cause calcium to enter
through this mechanically gated channels
and cause a contraction.
We can also have ligand gated channels are
present on the smooth muscle and, as I
said, the autonomic nervous system
actually can control smooth muscle.
We have alpha one, adrenergic receptors,
which are going to cause contraction of
the smooth muscle, blood vessels, for
instance.
And we have beta 2 receptors which are
present on the smooth muscle's airways,
which cause the airways to dilate or cause