This review traces the history of the discovery and subsequent understanding of smooth muscle cells and their motor innervation. Smooth muscle tissue is made up of thousands of very small, individual, electrically connected, muscle cells. Each axon that enters a smooth muscle tissue branches extensively to form a terminal arbour that comes close to hundreds of smooth muscle cells. The branches of the terminal arbour are varicose, and each varicosity, of which there can be thousands, contains numerous transmitter storage vesicles. However, the probability of an individual varicosity releasing transmitter onto the adjacent muscle cells when an action potential passes is low. Many axons influence each muscle cell, some because they release transmitter close to the cell, and some because the events that they cause in other cells are electrically coupled to the cell under investigation. In tissues where this has been assessed, 20 or more axons can influence a single smooth muscle cell. We present a model of the innervation and influence of neurons on smooth muscle.

这篇综述追溯了平滑肌细胞及其运动神经支配的发现和随后理解的历史。平滑肌组织由数千个非常小的、单独的、电连接的肌肉细胞组成。进入平滑肌组织的每个轴突广泛分支以形成接近数百个平滑肌细胞的末端乔木。末端乔木的分支是静脉曲张，每个静脉曲张，其中可以有数千个，包含许多发射器储存囊泡。然而，当动作电位通过时，个体静脉曲张将递质释放到相邻肌肉细胞上的概率很低。许多轴突影响每个肌肉细胞，有些是因为它们在细胞附近释放发射器，有些是因为它们在其他细胞中引起的事件与正在研究的细胞电耦合。在已经评估过的组织中，20 个或更多轴突可以影响单个平滑肌细胞。我们提出了神经元对平滑肌的神经支配和影响的模型。