• Question: How would you describe the structure of muscle fibres?

    Asked by Stephen Hickingbotham to Andrew, Lizzie, Nick, Sonia on 14 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Elizabeth Kapasa

      Elizabeth Kapasa answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Interesting question! It can get quite complex the deeper you look into it but I’ll give it a go and you can always ask me another question.
      There are different kinds of mucscle: skeletal (situated), smooth and cardiac muscle. Muscle is made of two main types of filaments – myosin and actin. The myosin have little heads that bind to the actin, then contract, and then release repeatedly in order to slide along the actin filament. This causes sections of muscle cells, called sarcomeres to contract. All of your muscle cells form lots of fibres which then are grouped into bundles and lots of these bundles make up your entire muscle. You should look up some videos on YouTube to see it in action through animations.

    • Photo: Andrew Phillips

      Andrew Phillips answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      I think of skeletal muscle like bunches of strings, but where the strings themselves can shorten. A chemical process allows one strand of string (called myosin) to move over another (called actin), causing the muscle to shorten or contract. Lots of the strands make up muscle fibres, and then lots of muscle fibres make up the muscle.

      When we build a hip joint on one of the workshops I run we treat ligaments as string, and then add toggles (like you might find on a drawstring bag) to string to represent muscles, so that we can tighten the muscles.

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