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Anatomy of a skeletal muscle fiber

Understanding the structure of a muscle fiber. Created by Sal Khan.

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  • blobby green style avatar for user Sakil Ahemed
    In which way the muscle cell is different from other types of cells?
    (6 votes)
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  • male robot hal style avatar for user Nicholas
    How does a molecule of actin moving across a molecule of myosin translate into a whole muscle moving with such speed?
    (4 votes)
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    • male robot hal style avatar for user Satwik Pasani
      There are six actin molecules around a single myosin molecules and there are more than 100,000 sarcomeres (one myosin and six actin make 1 sarcomere) in a single bicep muscle fibre (a single cell) and 253000 such fibres in a young man's bicep. Now even if 10 percent of such fibres are stimulated at once there are more than 2530000000 sarcomeres working that means there are six times this number of actins sliding over myosin. Imagine the magnification of the contraction effect it would produce. It would easily translate from the actin-myosin sliding to muscle contraction on large scale. You can take the amount of force of each actin myosin pair (from wikipedia) and multiply it to check the actual forces produced.
      (9 votes)
  • leafers seedling style avatar for user Richard Cardiel
    Why are some muscles big and others are small? Like strong and weak.
    (2 votes)
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    • male robot hal style avatar for user Jackson Guido
      Some muscles, such as the quadriceps, are large becuase they are constantly working to support your body, therefore they must be extremely strong.Other muscles are smaller becuase, although they do play a role in the structure and function of your body, they are less essential than some of the muscles that work constantly.
      (8 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user Mike Estes
    How do muscles cramp or twitch? I understand how the nervous system interacts to get the muscle fibers moving, but wondering what causes the muscles to twitch or cramp in relation to the videos and information shown. I'm guessing something to do with the sodium/potassium pump or calcium not moving or getting blocked/depleted. Or perhaps magnesium (see other question) plays a role here. Though I suppose there's always a neurological cause as well, bad signal or neurochemical.
    (5 votes)
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    • blobby green style avatar for user Mark AW
      Cramping, or aberrant twitching, is due to physical or chemical changes in skeletal muscle, taking muscle away from its normal resting condition (homeostasis). Whether chemical changes, or physical damage, it is typically related to changes in the membrane potential, and activation or short-circuiting.
      (4 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user Graham Sagadahl
    How does the signal from your muscles when they are contracting relay to your brain to release endorphins to give you that natural high when you are working out?
    (5 votes)
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    • blobby green style avatar for user erinaveryt
      Each sarcomere is bounded by clark straitions calledZ lines , inside it has a central
      striations with a darker tone, called A bands. and two brighter transverse striations,
      called I bands, These bands indicate the presences of actin filaments, which are
      thicker, and myosin, which are thinner and intertwined with each other.
      When the muscle fiber is relaxed , the contact surface between both types of protein filaments is at a minumum, When the fiber is recieves a nerve stimulus, the thin
      filaments slide over the thick filaments, causing distance between the Z lines,
      Which makes up the boundary of the sarcomere, to become narrow.
      This in turn,reduces the length of the microfibrils, and the stimulated muscles fibers
      becomes shorter. When the stimulus stops, the actin- myosin filaments resume their prior postion and the muscle is relaxed . hope this helps
      Got this from my ATLAS OF THE HUMAN BODY , ANATOMY, PHYSIOLOGY,
      And HEALTH Book I got at Borders before they went out of bussiness.
      Hope this helps.
      (2 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user Christopher Patino
    Isn't the plural of nucleus, nuclei?
    (4 votes)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user diana.ruiz65
    endomysium covers?
    (4 votes)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user ethancohen25
    Hey Sal, my teacher and AP Bio textbook both say that there is another layer of proteins in the myofibril called the myofilaments and these are the things that contain the contractile proteins (the myosin and actin). Is this correct because you said that the contractile proteins are in the myofibrils?
    (4 votes)
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  • leafers tree style avatar for user hikari
    At , wouldn't the "I-band" labelled be just half of the actual I-band since half of each I-band belongs to one sarcomere and the other half belongs to the neighboring sarcomere?
    (3 votes)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user angelina.hiong
    What is useful about the myofibrils? Why do we need it ?
    (2 votes)
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    • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user MEHER
      myofibrils are the basic functional unit of contraction.
      we know that muscles convert chemical energy into mechanical energy and its in the myofibrils of the muscles where this is taking place.
      we need myofibrils for contraction of our skeletal muscles bcoz of which our locomotion is possible.
      so thats why theyre pretty useful!
      (2 votes)

Video transcript

I think we have a respectable sense of how muscles contract on the molecular level. Let's take a step back now and just understand how muscles look, at least structurally, or how they relate to things that we normally associate with muscles. So let me draw a flexing bicep right here. That's their elbow and let's say that's their hand right there. So this is their bicep and it's flexing. I think we've all seen diagrams of what muscles look, at least on kind of a macro level and it's connected to the bones at either end. Let me draw the bones. I'm not going to detail where-- so it's connected to the bones at either end by tendons. So this right here would be some bone. Right there would be another bone that it's connected to. And then this is tendons, which connects the bones to the muscles. We have the general sense-- connected to two bones, when it contracts it moves some part of our skeletal system. So we're actually focused on skeletal muscles. The other types are smooth muscles and cardiac muscles. Cardiac muscles are those, as you can imagine, in our heart. And smooth muscles are-- these are more involuntary, slow moving muscles and things like our digestive tract. And I'll do video on that in the future, but most of the time when people say muscles, we associate them with skeletal muscles that move our skeletal system around, allow us to run and lift and talk and do and bite things. So this is what we normally associate-- let's dig in a little bit deeper here. So if I were to take a cross section of this bicep right there-- if I were to take a cross section of that muscle right there-- so let me do it big. And then it looks something like this. This is the inside of this muscle over here. Now I said back here, we had our tendon. And then there's actually a covering; there's no strict demarcation or dividing line between the tendon and the covering around this muscle, but that covering is called the epimysium and it's really just connective tissue that covers the muscle, kind of protects it, reduces friction between the muscle and the surrounding bone and other tissue that might be in this person's arm right there. And then within this muscle, you have connective tissue on the inside. Let me do it in another color. I'll do it in orange. This is called a perimyseum, and that's also just connective tissue inside of the actual muscle. And then each of these things that the perimysium is dividing off-- let me say if we were to take one of these things and allow it to go a little bit further-- so if we were to take this thing right here-- what this perimysium is dividing off-- and if we were to pull it out-- actually, let me do this one right here. If we were to pull this one out just like that-- so you have the perimysium surrounding it, right? This is all perimysium, and it's just a fancy word for connective tissue. There's other stuff in there. You could have nerves and you could have capillaries, all sorts of stuff because you have to get blood and neuronal signals to your muscles of entry so it's not just connective tissue. It's other things that have to be able to eventually get to your muscle cells. So each of these-- I guess you'd call it subfibers, but these are pretty big subfibers of the muscle. This is called a fascicle. The connective tissue inside of the fascicle is called the endomysium. So once again, more connective tissues, has capillaries in it, has nerves in it, all of the things that have to eventually come in contact with muscle cells. We're inside of a single muscle. All this green connective tissue is endomysium. And each of these things that are in the endomysium are an actual muscle cell. This is an actual muscle cell. I'll do it in purple. So this thing right here-- I can pull it out a little bit. If I pull this out, this is an actual muscle cell. This is what we wanted to get to, but we're going to go even within the muscle cell to see, understand how all the myosin and the actin filaments fit into that muscle cell. So this right here is a muscle cell or a myofiber. The two prefixes you'll see a lot when dealing with muscles-- you're going to see myo, which you can imagine refers to muscle. And you're also going to see the word sarco, like sarcolemma, or sarcoplasmic reticulum. So you're also go see the prefix sarco and that's flesh-- so sarcophagus-- or you can think of other things that start with sarco. So sarco is flesh. Muscle is flesh and myo is muscle. So this is myofiber. This is an actual muscle cell and so let's zoom in on the actual muscle. So let me actually draw it really a lot bigger here. So an actual muscle cell is called a myofiber. It's called a fiber because it's longer than it is wide and they come in various-- let me draw the myofiber like this. I'll take a cross section of the muscle cell as well. And these can be relatively short-- several hundred micrometers-- or it could be quite long-- at least quite long by cellular standards. We're talking several centimeters. Think of it as a cell. That's quite a long cell. Because it's so long, it actually has to have multiple nucleuses. Actually, to draw the nucleuses, let me do a better job drawing the myofiber. I'm going to make little lumps in the outside membranes where the nucleuses can fit on this myofiber. Remember, this is just one of these individual muscle cells and they're really long so they have multiple nucleuses. Let me take its cross section because we're going to go inside of this muscle cell. So I said it's multinucleated. So if we kind of imagine its membrane being transparent, there'd be one nucleus over here, another nucleus over here, another nucleus over here, another nucleus over there. And the reason why it's multinucleated is so that over large distances, you don't have to wait for proteins to get all the way from this nucleus all the way over to this part of the muscle cell. You can actually have the DNA information close to where it needs to be. So it's multinucleated. I read one-- I think it was 30 or so nucleuses per millimeter of muscle tissue is what the average is. I don't know if that's actually the case, but the nucleuses are kind of right under the membrane of the muscle cell-- and you remember what that's called from the last video. The membrane of the muscle cell is the sarcolemma. These are the nucleuses. And then if you take the cross section of that, there are tubes within that called myofibrils. So here there's a bunch of tubes inside of the actual cell. Let me pull one of them out. So I've pulled out one of these tubes. This is a myofibril. And if you were to look at this under a light microscope, you'll see it has little striations on it. the striations will look something like that, like that, like that, and there'll be little thin ones like that, like that. And inside of these myofibrils is where we'll find our myosin and actin filaments. So let's zoom in over here on this myofibril. We'll just keep zooming until we get to the molecular level. So this myofibril, which is-- remember, it's inside of the muscle cell, inside of the myofiber. The myofiber is a muscle cell. Myofibral is a-- you can view it as a tube inside of the muscle cell. These are the things that are actually doing the contraction. So if I were to zoom in on a myofibril, you're going to see it-- it's going to look something like that and it's going to have those bands in it. So the bands are going to look something like this. You're going to have these short bands like that. Then you're going to have wider bands like that, like these little dark-- trying my best to draw them relatively neatly and there could be a little line right there. Then the same thing repeats over here. So each of these units of repetition is called a sarcomere. And these units of repetition go from one-- this is called a Z-line to another Z-line. And all of this terminology comes out of when people just looked under a microscope and they saw these lines, they started attaching names to it. And just so you have the other terminology-- we'll talk about how this relates to the myosin and the actin in a second. This right here is the A-band. And then this distance right here or these parts right here, these are called the I-bands. And we'll talk about really in a few seconds how that relates to the mechanisms or the units that we talked-- or the molecules that we talked about in the last video. So if you were to zoom in here, if you were to go into these myofibrils, if you were to take a cross section of these myofibrils, what you'll find is-- if you were to cut it up, maybe slice it-- if you were slice it parallel to the actual screen that you're looking at, you're going to see something like this. So this is going to be your Z-band. This is your next Z-band. So I'm zooming in on sarcomere now. This is another Z-band. Then you have your actin filaments. Now we're getting to that molecular level that I talked about. And then in between the actin filaments, you have your myosin filaments. Remember, the myosin filaments had those two heads on them. They each have two heads like that, that crawl along the actin filaments. I'm just drawing a couple of them and then they're attached at the middle just like that. We'll talk about in a second what happens when the muscle actually contracts. And I could draw it again over here. So it has many more heads than what I'm drawing, but this just gives you an idea of what's happening. These are the myosin, I guess, proteins and they all intertwined like we saw in the previous video and then there'll be another one over here. I don't have to draw in detail. So you can see immediately that the A-band corresponds to where we have our myosin. So this is our A-band right here. And there is an overlap. They do overlap each other, even in the resting state, but the I-band is where you only have actin filaments, no myosin. And then the myosin filaments are held in place by titin, which you can kind of imagine as a springy protein. I want to do it in a different color than that. So the myosin is held in place by titin. It's attached to the Z-band by titin. So what happened? So we have all of these-- when a neuron excites-- so let me draw an endpoint of a neuron right here, the endpoint of an axon of a neuron right there. It's a motor neuron. It's telling this guy to contract. You have the action potential. The action potential travels along the membrane, really in all directions. And then it eventually, if we look at it from this view, they have those little transverse or T-tubules. They essentially go into the cell and continue to propagate the action potential. Those trigger the sarcoplasmic reticulum to release calcium. The calcium attaches to the troponin that's attached to these actin filaments that moves the tropomyosin out of the way, and then the crawling can occur. The myosin can start using ATP to crawl along these actin filaments. And so as you can imagine, as they crawl along, their power stroke is going to push-- you can either view it as the actin filaments in that way or you can say that the myosin is going to want to move in that direction, but you're pulling on both sides of a rope, right? So the myosin is going to stay in one place and the actin filaments are going to be pulled together. And that's essentially how the muscle is contracting. So we've, hopefully, in this video, connected the big picture from the flexing muscle all the way over here to exactly what's happening at the molecular level that we learned in the last few videos. And you can imagine, when this happens to all of the myofibrils inside of the muscle, right, because the sarcoplasmic reticulum's releasing calcium generally into the cytoplasm of-- which is also called myoplasm, because we're dealing with muscle cells-- the cytoplasm of this muscle cell. The calcium floods all of these myofibrils. It's able to attach to all of the troponin-- or at least a lot of the troponin on top of these actin filaments and then the whole muscle contracts. And then when that's done, each muscle fiber, myofiber, or each muscle cell will not have that much contracting power. But when you couple it with all of them that are around it-- if you just have one, actually, working, or a few of them, you'll just have a twitch. But if you have all of them contracting together, then that's actually going to create the force to actually do some work, or actually pull your bones together, or lift some weights. So hopefully you found that mildly useful.