Biology of Vascular Smooth Muscle

Dr. Yuansheng Gao received a diploma in military medicine from the Fourth Military Medical University (now Air Force Medical University) in Xian, China in 1977, and a master degree in physiology from Beijing Medical College (now Peking University Health Science Center) in Beijing, China in 1982. He received his PhD in physiology (supervisor: Paul M Vanhoutte) in 1990 from Mayo Graduate School (now Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences), MN, USA and obtained his postdoctoral training (supervisor: Paul M Vanhoutte) from 1990 to 1992 at Baylor College of Medicine, TX, USA. He was an adjunct assistant professor (1992-1999) and adjunct associate professor (1999- 2002) in Dr. Usha J Raj’s laboratory at the Department of Pediatrics, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, CA, USA, a professor at the Department of Physiology and Pathophysiology at Peking University Health Science Center from 2002 to 2014, a visiting professor at the Department of Pediatrics, University ofIllinois College of Medicine at Chicago, Chicago, USA from 2011 to 2015, and a honorary professor at the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy at the University of Hong Kong’s Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, Hong Kong, China from 2014 to 2018. He has been a member of American Physiological Society since1995, a lifetime member of the Asian Society for Vascular Biology (council member from 2005 to 2018), and the review editor for the journal “Frontiers in Vascular Physiology” since 2011. He has been involved in research on the signaling transduction in vascular smooth muscles for more than 30 years, and has published over 100 original research and review articles in these fields.

Architecture of the vessel wall.- Ultrastructure of vascular smooth muscle.- Vascular endothelium.- Electrical and mechanical properties of vascular smooth muscle.- Biochemistry of the contractile proteins of smooth muscle.- Metabolism of vascular smooth muscle.- Neurotransmitters.- Endothelium-derived factors.- Local metabolic factors.- Shear stress, myogenic response, and blood flow autoregulation.- Intracellular Ca2+ regulation.- Regulation of myosin light chain phosphorylation.- Cyclic AMP signaling.- Cyclic GMP signaling.- MicroRNAs and vasoreactivity.- Extracellular vesicles as unique signaling messengers.- Genetic and epigenetic modification.- Coronary vasoreactivity.- Cerebral vasoreactivity.- Pulmonary vasoreactivity.- Renal vasoreactivity.- Hypoxic vasoreactivity .- Ageing and vasoreactivity.