“…Mitochondrial Ca 2+ influx via the MCU (Baughman et al, 2011;De Stefani et al, 2011) is only activated by microdomains of higher [Ca 2+ ] cyt ("hotspots" > 2 µM) (Gunter et al, 2000;Gunter and Gunter, 2001;Rizzuto and Pozzan, 2006;Gunter and Sheu, 2009;Rizzuto et al, 2009;Giacomello et al, 2010), which exceed the normal global transient [Ca 2+ ] cyt response to agonist stimulation in hASM (∼500-600 nM) (Pabelick et al, 1999;Sieck et al, 2008;Sathish et al, 2009Sathish et al, , 2011Delmotte et al, 2012). Higher levels of [Ca 2+ ] cyt do occur after 24-h TNFα exposure in response to muscarinic stimulation (Delmotte et al, 2012;Delmotte and Sieck, 2015;Dogan et al, 2017;Sieck et al, 2019), but are still well below levels required to activate the MCU (Gunter et al, 2000;Gunter and Gunter, 2001;Rizzuto and Pozzan, 2006;Gunter and Sheu, 2009;Rizzuto et al, 2009;Giacomello et al, 2010). However, much higher levels of [Ca 2+ ] cyt ("hotspots") are observed in regions in close proximity to the ER Ca 2+ efflux channels (IP 3 and RyR).…”