The cerebellum — an athlete and a scholar

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Cerebellum, athlete and scolar

The cerebellum, once thought to be simply a motor coordination center, is now understood to participate in both cognitive and emotional processing.  Somewhat resembling the cerebrum (with lobes and a highly folded cortex), but far smaller, it was given the name cerebellum meaning “little brain”.  After early studies showed its obvious role in motor coordination, the cerebellum was type-cast as a dedicated motor processor.

Even on a purely anatomical level, the cerebellum is an amazing structure.  While making up only 11% of the brain’s mass, it contains about half of all neurons in the brain.  It achieves this phenomenal density with vast numbers of tiny neurons called granule cells.  Indeed, their small size and density has slowed progress by making it difficult to record the activity of individual cells.  On the tissue level, the cerebellum has an impressively regular organization that’s suggestive of a printed circuit board.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that new research implicates the cerebellum as a “calculator”, not just for motor coordination, but in other roles.  A study last year (summarized here) showed greater involvement between the cerebellum and cognitive centers, lending credence to the notion that it plays  a general role in “quality control”, not just in movement but in thinking.  And a paper earlier this year (summarized here) showed powerful control by the cerebellum over an emotional reward center in the brain, thus controlling behavior.  Other studies have suggested roles for the cerebellum in autism and schizophrenia.  With this recent “sprint” in research, the cerebellum has begun to earn new respect.

 

 

 

 

Hepatocyte, Jack of 500 trades

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hepatocyte, jack of 500 trades

Our largest internal organ, the liver, is also one of the most versatile — it performs over 500 different functions.  Virtually all its functions are performed by hepatocytes (literally, “liver cells”).  Here, one of the liver’s 200 billion hepatocytes looms greatly enlarged, busily carrying out five of these vital functions — represented by familiar visual metaphors.

  • Conversion of protein (and other compounds) to glucose — a group of processes known as gluconeogenesis.  Here, a ham (high in protein content) is converted to some candies (mostly sugar).
  • Glucose storage and release — the conversion of glucose to glycogen (and  back again) — plays a major role in the regulation of blood sugar levels.  (Here, glycogen is represented as a slice of bread — not quite glycogen, but it’s made of starch, another long-chain carbohydrate.)
  • Secretion of bile, containing among its components bile salts, molecules that bind to fats on one side, and water on the other.  In doing so, they stabilize — in other words, emulsify — small drops of fat, making them more available for efficient enzymatic digestion.  The green dish detergent is an apt metaphor in two ways.  First, it works much the same way as bile salts, emulsifying the grease on your dishes so it can be washed away.  Second, bile is in fact green!  The color comes from bilirubin, another component of bile, which serves to excrete broken down red blood cells and has a strong color (which changes depending on the exact compound) owing to its iron content.
  • Secretion of blood proteins, such as albumins — represented here by egg whites (which do contain albumins as a major component).  Among other roles, blood proteins modify the osmotic balance of your blood, preventing it from losing too much fluid in your capillary beds.
  • Metabolism of drugs and poisons, typically converting them into a form that can be more easily excreted by the kidney into the urine.

Smooth muscle, ace of tubes

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Smooth muscle, ace of tubes

What’s your favorite muscle tissue?  Odds are you’ll say skeletal muscle, the type used in all voluntary movements.  Or, you might be partial to cardiac muscle, the main tissue component of your heart.  But there’s much to appreciate in the third muscle tissue, smooth muscle.  It’s a major component of your tubular organs – those of the digestive, urinary, reproductive, and respiratory systems, as well as your blood vessels – and for good reason.

The name “smooth muscle” refers to the lack of striations – the stripes visible on skeletal and cardiac muscle cells.  Those stripes reflect a highly regular, organized arrangement of protein filaments that give great strength and efficiency to striated muscle tissues.  But it comes at a cost – if you overstretch a skeletal or cardiac muscle cell, it becomes completely unable to contract.  That’s because muscle contraction depends on the sliding of myosin and actin filaments past one another.  Without any overlap to start with, the myosin molecules have nothing to grab onto.

Smooth muscle gets around this problem with a loose, net-like arrangement of myosin and actin.  When the cell is stretched, this network starts to straighten out, which means each group of myosin and actin suffers little tension.  The result is that much more overlap is maintained and these cells remain functional.

Why is this so important for a tubular organ?  Many of your tubes undergo stretching – think of your stomach after a big meal — which in turn, stretches the muscle cells.  But many other tubular organs undergo fluctuations in diameter, and smooth muscle allows them to contract under a wide variety of conditions.

Smooth muscle is also the only type of muscle cell that can divide after birth – a crucial feature in repairing a damaged wall after the passage of a chicken bone or a kidney stone.  Also, blood vessels can grow and change shape in response to changing demands – made possible by the production of new smooth muscle tissue.

Let’s give smooth muscle a little respect.  It may lack obvious “sex appeal” at first.  But considering smooth muscle makes up a big part of your reproductive organs, maybe it’s the “sexiest” muscle tissue of all!

Dense connective tissue — diverse hardware for the body machine

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Dense connective tissues

If bones are the “steel frame” of the body and cartilage forms the “rubber shock absorbers” between your bones, what name do we give for all the nuts, bolts, stitches, pulleys, cords, housings, laces, bindings, springs and bungees that connect our parts together?

These tough, durable attachment structures are provided by the dense connective tissues of the body.  Like connective tissues in general, these tissues have few living cells (here, fibroblasts, shown traveling among the fibers).  But in contrast to other connective tissues, the word “dense” here refers to an especially high density of collagen fibers.  Collagen fibers provide a strong “steel cable” that is difficult to tear apart, and thus is used to provide tension resistance in body tissues.  Collagen is such an important structural component that it makes up 25% of body protein – your most abundant protein of all.

There are three types of dense connective tissue:

  • In dense irregular connective tissue, the collagen fibers lie in all different directions. This type is useful in tissues that are subject to unpredictable forces.  The deep part of your skin (dermis) is a good example – there’s no telling what part of your face your grandma is going to pinch, and in what direction!  This type also forms a fibrous capsule around joints and various organs.
  • In dense regular connective tissue, the collagen fibers are all lined up together, providing tremendous strength against tension, but only in one direction. It’s the tissue used in our tendons – cord-like structures that attach a muscle to a bone and allow the muscle to pull on the bone.  It’s also used by ligaments – cord-like structures that attach one bone to another, and prevent the two bones from being ripped apart from each other.
  • In elastic connective tissue, we also find a high density of collagen, but with an important difference. Large numbers of elastic fibers dominate the behavior of the tissue.  The result is like an elastic band — you can stretch it, but when you let go, it recoils right back to its original shape.  It’s an important component of arteries, allowing them to stretch when the blood pressure varies.  It also allows your lungs to exhale without using any energy, saving energy in ventilation.  There are also elastic ligaments in your neck that give your head a little bounce when you start to fall asleep in class — perhaps saving you from injury, while providing the rest of the class with an entertaining demonstration!

A bottle model to explain lung ventilation and pneumothorax

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bottle model of lung ventilation and pneumothorax

To understand how your lungs work, you need to understand how they function within the context of your chest, or thorax.  In other words, your lungs don’t work within a vacuum.  Wait — correction — your lungs DO work within a vacuum!  (Well, almost a vacuum.)  That’s because in order for your lungs to expand, there needs to be low pressure between the lungs and the wall of the thorax.

It’s easy to make a simple model to demonstrate how breathing works.  Take a large soda bottle and cut off the bottom.  Replace the bottom with a flexible rubber sheet from the hardware store, to represent the diaphragm, and attach it securely to the bottle using a rubber band or super glue. To represent a lung, you take a party balloon, insert it into the top of the balloon, and stretch the opening of the balloon over the bottle to attach it securely.

To inhale, pull down on the diaphragm.  This increases the volume of the space between the bottle and the balloon, decreasing its pressure as a result.  That space represents the pleural cavity, which is a very narrow space in the healthy human body but plays a crucial role in ventilation.  When the chest expands, the lungs expand only because the pleural cavity is “vacuum sealed”.  Its low pressure counteracts the natural tendency of the lung tissues to recoil.  Thus, when the chest expands, the lung expands as well, and air is sucked into the lung.

The “vacuum seal” of the pleural cavity can be broken if the chest wall is perforated (such as by a bullet or knife wound).  It can also happen if only the lung itself is damaged (which can sometimes be caused by physical trauma).  In either case, when you attempt to breathe by expanding the thorax, air quickly enters the pleural cavity, where you don’t want it to be.  This condition is known as pneumothorax (“air within the thorax”).  Without the near-vacuum in your pleural cavity, there is nothing to keep your lung expanded and it collapses.

To represent pneumothorax in the “bottle model”, you can poke a hole either in the side of the bottle, or in the balloon itself — you’ll find that the balloon no longer expands.  When I present this model to my class, I ask my students to imagine this last step.  I’m always very excited (as shown above) just to get the thing working at all, so I’ll be darned if I’m going to poke any holes in it!

How muscles work

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muscle contraction

Here’s how we move, using the elbow as an example.  A muscle is attached to the bones on either side of your elbow joint.  Inside the muscle, proteins called myosin (red), which are arranged in tiny rows called thick filaments, have little arms that reach out and grab onto proteins called actin (blue), which are arranged in tiny rows called thin filaments.  Alternately grabbing, pulling, and releasing, the myosin, like a tug-of-war team, brings the actin on one side closer to the actin on the other side.  The shortening of the muscle, which results from this sliding filament mechanism, is called muscle contraction.  Because the muscle is attached to each bone by a tendon, the bones are pulled together and the elbow bends.

This arrangement of proteins, like a stack of flattened hexagons, is called a sarcomere.  It’s the “functional unit” of muscle contraction, meaning that in theory, if a muscle had just one sarcomere like in the cartoon, it would still work.

That’s the simple version.

The molecules, of course, are shown greatly enlarged.  To maximize efficiency, the muscle has an intricate structure of repeating units that will make your head spin.  Sarcomeres are attached end-to-end (about 10,000 per inch) to form contractile rods called myofibrils, and myofibrils are stacked side-by-side to fill each muscle cell, which is also known as a muscle fiber.  A unique feature of skeletal muscle tissue (the type that can be voluntarily controlled, as in the example) is that the individual cells are extremely long – almost as long as the muscle itself!  So a muscle in the arm has “only” around 250,000 muscle fibers – far fewer than the billions of cells one normally finds in an organ.  The extreme length of our skeletal muscle cells probably makes them quicker and more efficient.

Now let’s consider the entire muscle again.  Its whole purpose is to move a bone through space.  To do this, it has to have a stable attachment at one end, called the origin.  When the muscle contracts, the other attachment, known as the insertion, is moved closer to the origin, and this is what bends your elbow.  Within the muscle, all of the sarcomeres are shortening at once, but the ones closest to the origin are hardly moving at all.  Meanwhile the sarcomeres near the insertion are moving rapidly, pulled by the cumulative efforts of all the myosin molecules further up the myofibril, allowing the muscle to win the “tug of war” against gravity.

The versatile pharynx

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Pharynx depicted with legs, eyes, and nose.

Here’s a body part you’ve probably never seen in isolation — and almost certainly not with legs, and a face of its own!  But these embellishments serve to emphasize that the pharynx is a middle-man, straddling two different organ systems and negotiating the competing demands of each.

Ideally, air travels in through the nasal cavity, all three parts of the pharynx (nasopharynx, oropharynx, laryngopharynx), and then the larynx, on its way to the lungs.  While eating, breathing is paused while food travels through the oral cavity (mouth), the lower parts of the pharynx (oropharynx, laryngopharynx), and the esophagus on its way to the stomach.  But as you can see, these two pathways overlap in the pharynx.  As a result, the pharynx, along with associated structures, plays a vital role in regulating the passage of air and food.

There are four ways that food and air movement can differ from the ideal situation depicted above, and these “mistakes” vary all the way from innocuous (and perhaps entertaining) to life-threatening.

First, food could move through the upper pharynx (nasopharynx).  Sometimes food is expelled this way if you sneeze or laugh while food is in your mouth.  But most of the time, the soft palate, a muscular structure, closes against the back of the pharynx to prevent this.  If you want to “get in touch” with your soft palate, try snorting – you just closed your soft palate and then opened it while inhaling.  A word to the wise: Restrict your snorting to air and mucus!  But unfortunately, if you can think of it, somebody will try it — the FDA had to issue a warning not to snort chocolate powder.

Second, air can move between the middle pharynx (oropharynx) and the mouth.  Wait, you may say, isn’t this exactly how we breathe?  If that’s your impression, then you probably have a congested nasal cavity, and it’s true we can breathe through the mouth, although it’s less than ideal.  The reason is that the nasal cavity has complex folds that help to trap debris and pathogens and do an optimal job of “conditioning” the air before it reaches the lungs.  So if, as I often do, you find yourself walking behind a group of sneezing and coughing students, it may help to close your mouth and breathe through your nose.

Like the rest of your respiratory and digestive tracts, the pharynx is a moist habitat suitable for invading microbes, and being near the entrance to both tracts, it is a common place for infections to begin.  What’s known as a “sore throat” is generally a viral infection of the pharynx.  That’s likely why we have several immune structures — the tonsils — in the walls of the pharynx.

Third, air can move between the lower pharynx (laryngopharynx) and the esophagus – the food tube leading to the stomach.  According to healthline, in most of us about two quarts of air move into the stomach this way, each day, from the small amounts of air trapped in our food or drink.  And of course, when air leaves the body through this route it is called burping — technically known as eructation.

The fourth, and by far the most serious problem, is food traveling from the laryngopharynx into the larynx.  The larynx, or voicebox, sits in front of the esophagus and is the gateway for the lower respiratory tract.  “Inhaling” your food is dangerous — in the US, over 5,000 people die from choking each year. Our main protection from choking is the epiglottis — a laryngeal cartilage between the oropharynx and nasopharynx, which folds down to close off the entrance to the larynx, every time you swallow.

Your pharynx handles a lot of traffic through the body, and deserves some respect – definitely nothing to snort at!

 

How a long bone grows longer

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How a long bone gets longer

The process by which your bones lengthen (during childhood and adolescence) is known as longitudinal bone growth.  It’s more complicated than you might think, so I’ve simplified it here.  There’s a strip of cartilage (the epiphyseal plate, or growth plate) embedded in each end of the bone, and that’s where all the lengthening growth occurs.

Within that plate, a remarkable process occurs.  First, as you might expect, the cartilage cells grow and divide, and this is what actually lengthens the bone.  But next, the cartilage cells essentially commit mass suicide, by creating a chemical “prison” that blocks the entry of nutrients and oxygen.  As the tissue dies it leaves a space behind, where bone cells can come in and add hard bone matrix.  Ultimately, this means the bone lengthens, and the whole “construction team” of cells follows the growth region as it extends further out.  It’s analogous to a road construction crew, where you have workers engaged in all steps of construction, but positioned at different points along the road.

But instead of painting a “center line,” the final step for our bone construction team is to lengthen the internal space of the bone.  This is known as the medullary cavity, and it’s there to make the bone lighter, and to house other important tissues (like bone marrow).  A group of “demolition” cells called osteoclasts lives near the end of the medullary cavity and continually eats away at the bone matrix.  This lengthens the medullary cavity, keeping its size in correct proportion, as the bone grows longer.

Why start with cartilage at all?  Unlike bone, cartilage is mostly water so it’s an easy tissue to rapidly assemble during early development.  Later in development, most of this cartilage is replaced by bone, but an important remnant of that early cartilage is the growth plate discussed here, which persists until adult height is reached.

The blind spot in the human eye

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The blind spot in the human eye

Normally, the blind spot goes unnoticed, for two reasons.  First, each eye fills in the gap in what the other eye is seeing.  So, if a mosquito is hidden in the blind spot of your right eye, you can still detect it with your left.  Each eye plays “backup” to the other.

So, does that mean that if you close one eye, you’ll see a blank “hole” in your vision, everywhere you look? While there really is a “hole” in your perception, it’s not that easy to detect. The reason is that the brain’s visual processing center fills in the “hole” by extrapolating from the surrounding area. So, if you look at a blue sky with one eye, the blind spot “sees” blue as well.

The way to “see” the blind spot is to both close one eye, and prevent your brain from extrapolating the surroundings. The way to do that is using an object that contrasts sharply with its surroundings but is small enough to “hide” inside the blind spot. In the example above, a round black spot is used.

The blind spot is one of my favorite topics for a classroom demonstration.  Using a document camera, I project an “X” on the left side of the screen, and a “dot” a short distance to the right.  I tell the entire class to close their left eye, focus their right eye on an “X” projected on the screen, and to raise their hand if the dot disappears.  I then slide the dot slowly to the right (on the document camera, this is easy to do if the “X” and the “dot” are on separate pieces of paper).  At first, only students in the front rows raise their hand, but as the visual angle between the shapes increases, hands go down in the front and start to go up further and further back in the room.

There’s a vas deferens between your epididymis and your ejaculatory duct

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vas deferens mnemonic with Prof. Sperm at the chalkboard

You’ve almost made it through a semester of anatomy.  Like a sperm cell, you sometimes feel like just another face in the crowd, but you know there’s light at the end of the tunnel!

But first, you need to make sense of that tangle of tubes known as the male reproductive system.

The epididymis – which rhymes suggestively with “did he miss” – is the site of final sperm maturation.  Twenty feet of tiny tubing is coiled so tightly it fits in a structure less than two inches long, that hangs like a comma over the testis.  The epididymis is also where the sperm bide their time until ejaculation occurs.

But most of the semen is not sperm, and is instead produced by glands, found further down the assembly line.  The seminal vesicle, in particular, plays a seminal role, producing 60% of the semen, a concoction of nutrients, signals and other molecules.

On Professor Sperm’s chalkboard diagram, the ejaculatory duct represents the confluence where the wriggling sperm are doused with this sticky cocktail.  Other glands down the pipeline (prostate and bulbourethral glands) complete the mix, as it travels through the urethra on its way to the exit.

If all those tubes are starting to sound alike, take heart!  Between the epididymis and the ejaculatory duct, there’s truly a vast difference, and also, a vas deferens.  This longest of the male tubes (18 inches or so) is called into play only at the time of ejaculation, transporting the sperm all the way up the scrotum, along the inguinal canal and finally hurtling them into the ejaculatory duct.

In place of “vas deferens”, many books now use the term “ductus deferens”.  To that, I say, “same difference!”