Tropomyosin (TM) is a regulatory protein of actomyosin system. Muscle type-specific expression of TM isoforms is generated from different genes and by alternative splicing. -TM isoforms in chicken skeletal and smooth muscles are encoded by a single gene and transcribed from the same promoter. We previously reported a smooth muscle cell (SMC) phenotype-dependent change in -TM expression (Kashiwada, K., Nishida, W., Hayashi, K., Ozawa, K., Yamanaka, Y., Saga, H., Yamashita, T., Tohyama, M., Shimada, S., Sato, K., and Sobue, K.