During heavy exercise the arterial resistance vessels and their upstream feed arteries need to be maximally dilated to achieve full conductivity for the necessary amount of blood flow. For this, a system coordinating the vasomotor responses of all these vessels needs to be present. Resent results suggest that this coordination may be achieved via electrotonic signal propagation originating in capillary endothelium and traveling along the vascular cells. However, little is known about the signal generating cells. The aim is therefore to investigate whether pericytes, which lie between muscle cells and capillary endothelium, are able to sense the metabolic state of the muscle and transmit a signal to the endothelium. For the first time, pericytes were isolated from skeletal muscles. The skeletal muscles were taken from hamster, digestived and grown in selective medium. The pericytes were characterized morphologically, biochemically as well as by growth characteristic. By patch clamping or Western blotting, it was shown that the pericytes contains kv1.5 channels and that connexin 43 was the only connexin present in the cells. These preliminary data suggest that pericytes in skeletal muscles have the capacity to generate a signal by hyperpolarization and this signal has the possibility to travel through the connexin 43 to neighboring cells.