How do muscle cells work?
1 Answer
Skeletal muscles (which can be controlled by your conscious mind) work by sliding filaments over each other, smooth muscles work by twisting their nucleus and cardiac muscles, also with filaments sliding over eachother
Explanation:
Skeletal muscle cells are long strands with sarcomeres. The little " feet" of the brown filaments (myosin) in the image pull the actin filaments toward each other.
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Skeletal muscles tend to be stronger than smooth muscles, but require much more ATP to function.
As you can see in the next image, the cells are ordered neatly next to each other. You can see the clear stripes within the muscle cells, which indicate multiple units of the above image.
Smooth muscle cells are long cells (by far not as long as skeletal muscle cells) These muscle] cells contract by twisting their entirety, including the nucleus.
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Cardiac muscles are similar to skeletal muscles, as they contain the same sarcomeres the skeletal muscles do. A key difference between cardiac muscle and skeletal muscle is that the cardiac muscles contract involuntarily.
The cardiac muscle cells have a lot of extra connections between them, the intercalated discs, to withstand the stress of continuous contraction.
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