Skeletal muscles are voluntary muscles that can be consciously controlled, such as the muscles of your neck, arms, and legs. It makes up 30% to 40% of human body weight in a healthy person. The ...

Fig. 1 The relationship among smooth muscle actin, ACTA2 gene and contractile property in vasculopathies. The contractility of the smooth muscle cells is maintained via cyclic interactions between ...

eLife Assessment The authors present a useful agent-based model to study the tensile force generated by myosin mini-filaments in actin systems (bundles and networks); by numerically solving a ...

When a cardiac muscle cell contracts, the myosin filament pulls the actin filaments toward each other, which causes the cell to shrink. The cell uses ATP to power this contraction.

Smooth muscle myosin II (SMII), the main motor protein in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC), generates the contractile forces crucial to VSMC function. SMII filaments assemble into bundles that bind ...

Myosin light chain (MLC) phosphorylation is the essential determinant of smooth muscle contraction because it increases cross-bridge cycling. MLC phosphorylation state is the result of a ...

Does protein build muscle? The answer to this question is a resounding, ‘yes’. Muscle tissue is composed of a repeating structure of two protein filaments: myosin and actin. Myosin and actin ...

Contractile VSMCs possess a greater abundance of α-smooth muscle actin (αSMA) and smooth muscle-myosin heavy chain (SM-MyHC), that enhance their ability to generate actomyosin forces and contract ...

Muscles contract by sliding between thick filaments of myosin and thin filaments of actin. But there has been a longstanding controversy about the dynamics of this molecular machine. Researchers ...

When myosin pulls actin filaments together, the sarcomere length is reduced. In non-muscle and smooth muscle cells, actomyosin is not organized into sarcomeres.

This results in calcium rushing into the muscle, allowing actin and myosin to spring into action. Smooth muscle cells can be activated by neuronal signaling or by hormones.