Chapter 9 - Muscles and Muscle Tissue Flashcards
Types of muscle tissue
- Skeleton
- Cardiac
- Smooth
- Skeletal and smooth muscle cells are elongated and called muscle fibers.
- Myo or mys (roots for muscle) and sacro are in reference to muscle.
Skeletal muscle
- Skeletal muscle tissue is packaged into the skeletal muscles, organs that attach to and cover the skeleton.
- Skeletal muscle cells are the longest and have stripes/striations.
- Skeletal muscles are voluntary muscles.
- Skeletal muscles can contract rapidly but tire easily, and can exert tremendous power.
Cardiac muscle
- Cardiac muscle cells are striated, but involuntary.
- Neural controls can allow the heart to speed up for brief periods (i.e. running a race).
Smooth muscle
- Found in the walls of hollow visceral organs
- Its role is to force fluids and other substances through internal body channels.
- Smooth muscle forms valves to regulate the passage of substances through internal body openings, dilates pupils of eyes, forms arrector pilli.
- Smooth muscle consists of elongated cells NO striations; Involuntary muscle
Characteristics of muscle tissue: What enables muscle tissue to perform its duties?
- Excitability/responsiveness: the ability of a cell to receive and respond to stimulus by changing its membrane potential.
- Contractility: the ability to shorten forcibly when adequately stimulated. This ability sets muscle apart from all other tissue types.
- Extensibility: the ability to extend or stretch. Muscle cells can be stretched even beyond their resting length when relaxed.
- Elasticity: is the ability of a muscle cell to recoil and resume its resting length after stretching.
Muscle Functions
- Produce movement: skeletal muscles responsible for all locomotion and manipulation. Eg. Walking, digestion, pumping blood.
- Maintain posture and body position
- Stabilize joints
- Generate heat as they contract
Nerve and blood supply of skeletal muscles
- One nerve, one artery and one or more veins serves each muscle.
- Every skeletal muscle fiber is supplied with a nerve ending that controls its activity.
- Contracting muscle fibers use huge amounts of energy and require almost continuous delivery of oxygen and nutrients via the arteries.
- These muscles also need waste products removed frequently.
Photo: Connective tissue sheaths of skeletal muscle: epimysium, perimysium, and endomysium
Connective tissue sheaths of skeletal muscles
- Sheaths support each cell and reinforce and hold together the muscle, preventing muscles from bursting.
- 3 types of sheaths:
1. Epimysium - an overcoat of dense irregular connective tissue that surrounds the whole muscle.
2. Perimysium and fasicles - Within each muscle, muscle fibers are grouped into fasicles resembling bundles of sticks. Surrounding each fasicle is the perimysium (dense irregular connective tissue).
3. Endomysium - sheath of connective tissue that surrounds each individual muscle fiber (fine areolar connective tissue).
Attachments of skeletal muscles
- Muscle attachments, whether origin or insertion, may be direct or indirect.
- In direct, or fleshy attachments, the epimysium is fused to the periosteum of a bone or perichondrium of cartilage.
- In indirect attachments, the muscle’s connective tissue wrappings extend beyond the muscle usually as a tendon
Skeletal muscle fiber
- Each skeletal muscle fiber is a long cylindrical cell with multiple oval nuclei just beneath its sarcolemma (plasma membrane).
- These muscle fibers are huge cells.
- A muscle cell contains 3 specialized structures (other than its other organelles):
1. Myofibrils
2. Sarcoplasmic reticulum
3. T tubules
Sarcoplasm
The cytoplasm of a muscle cell.
Usually contains large amounts of:
- glycosomes (granules of stored glycogen that provide glucose during muscle cell activity for ATP production).
- myoglobin (a red pigment that stores oxygen).
Myofibrils
- Rod-like, these run parallel to the length of the muscle fiber (each fiber contains 100s to 1000s of myofibrils).
- Myofibrils are very densely packed and account for 80% of the cell volume.
- Myofibrils are made of a chain of sacromeres linked end to end. Sacromeres contain very small rodlike structures called myofilaments.
Striations
- Striations are a repeating series of dark and light bands along the length of each myofibril.
- A bands are dark
- I bands are light
- These bands give the cell its striated appearance.
Sarcomeres
The region between the 2 successive Z discs is a sarcomere.
- Sarcomere is the smallest contractile unit of a muscle fiber (the functional unit of a skeletal muscle).
- Contains an A band flanked by half an I band at each end.
- In each microfibril, sarcomeres align end to end.
Myofilaments
- The banding patten of a myofibril arises from the arrangement of even smaller structures within the sarcomeres, known as myofilaments.
- Myofilaments - actin-containing microfilaments and myosin motor proteins.
- Actin and myosin play a role in motility and shape change in cells.
- 2 types of contractile myofilaments in a sarcomere:
1. Thick filaments
2. Thin filaments
Photo: Myofilament
Thick filaments in myofilament
- Contain myosin (red)
- Extend the length of the A band.
- Connected in middle of sarcomere at the M line.
Thin filaments in myofilament
- Contain actin (blue)
- Extend across the I band and partway into the A band.
- The Z disc anchors the thin filaments.
Skeletal muscle fibers contain 2 sets of intracellular tubules that help regulate muscle contraction:
- The Sarcoplasmic Reticulum
- T Tubules
Sarcoplasmic Reticulum
- The SR is an elaborate smooth endoplasmic reticulum.
- SR regulates intracellular levels of ionic calcium.
- Stores calcium and releases it on demand when muscle fiber is stimulated to contract.
- SR surrounds each myofibril
- SR tubules run along the myofibril, and communicate with each other at the Hzone.
Terminal cisterns of the SR
- End sacs
- Form larger, perpendicular cross channels at the A band - I band junctions, occurring in pairs.
- There are also mitochondria and glycogen granules, all of which are involved in producing energy used during contractions.
Photo: Relationship of the SR and T Tubules to myofibrils of skeletal muscle…
T Tubules
- An elongated tube formed at each A band - I band junction, where the sarcolemma of the fiber protrudes deep into the cell interior.
- The lumen (cavity of the T tubule) is continuous with the extracellular space so that T tubules greatly increase the fiber’s surface area, allowing changes in the membrane potential to quickly penetrate deep into the muscle fiber.
- T tubules are continuations of the sarcolemma, hence they conduct impulses to the deepest regions of the muscle cell and every sarcomere.
- These impulses trigger calcium release from adjacent terminal cisterns.
- T tubules ensure that every myofibril in a muscle fiber contracts at the same time.
Triads
- A formation that occurs when the T tubule runs between the paired terminal cisterns of the SR.
The sliding filament model of contraction
- Contraction: The activation of myosin’s cross bridges, which are force generating sites.
- If the cross bridges generate enough tension on the thin filaments to exceed opposing forces, then shortening occurs.
- Contraction ends - cross bridges become inactive, muscle fibers relax.
Sliding filament model of contraction states that…
During contraction, the thin filaments slide past the thick ones so that the actin and myosin filaments overlap to a greater degree. Neither the thick or thin filaments change length during contraction.
How the sliding filament model of contraction works
- Nervous system stimulates muscle fibers, myosin heads on thick filaments latch onto myosin-binding sites on actin in thin filaments, and sliding begins.
- These cross bridge attachments form and break several times during contraction (tiny ratchets), generating tension and propelling the thin filaments toward the center of the sarcomere.
- Simultaneously in the sarcomeres throughout the cell, the muscle cell shortens.