Elastic fibres are essential extracellular matrix macromolecules comprising an elastin core surrounded by a mantle of fibrillin-rich microfibrils. They endow connective tissues such as blood vessels, lungs and skin with the critical properties of elasticity and resilience. The biology of elastic fibres is complex because they have multiple components, a tightly regulated developmental depositio...

The centrally located, mitochondria-poor (CMP) and superficially located, mitochondria-rich (SMR) circular muscle fibres in the mantles of some squids provide one of the few known examples of specialization in an obliquely striated muscle. Little is known of the mechanical properties or of the mechanisms and performance consequences of specialization in these fibres. We combined morphological a...

Objective: To assess the thickness and color of collagen fibres in various odontogenic cysts for its possible role in expansion. Study design: 49 cases of 4 types of odontogenic cysts and 5 normal mucosal tissues were selected as the study and the control group respectively. All slides were stained with both Hemotoxylin and Eosin and the picrosirius red stain. The thickness of collagen fibres w...

Since Overton's finding on muscle (1), examination on the effect of Na deficient media upon the nervous function has been a centre of interest (27). The blocking concentration, or the minimal concentration required for conduction, has been said to be 10-15% of that of the normal Ringer for nonmyelinated fibres of the Crustacean (4) and 0.011 M for myelinated fibres of the frog (5), which are al...

Neuropeptide tyrosine (NPY), a newly discovered peptide known to modulate blood vessel diameter and smooth muscle tone, has been found in many mammalian organs. Its distribution is similar to that of sympathetic nerve fibres and NPY immunoreactivity has been found in noradrenergic ganglion cells. In a study of the respiratory tract of four mammalian species--man, cat, guinea pig, and rat--NPY i...

Sclereid formation in addition to or in gaps of fragmented fibre rings is common in dicotyledonous plant stems. Whether this sclereid formation is force-triggered remains open so far. In fruit peduncles of several Malus species as modified plant stems, for example, the persistent fibre ring is displaced to the centre by formation of cortex parenchyma during growth. Parenchyma cells subsequently...

The zebrafish embryo develops a series of anatomically distinct slow twitch muscle fibres that characteristically express genes encoding lineage-specific isoforms of sarcomeric proteins such as MyHC and troponin. We show here that different subsets of these slow fibres express distinct members of a tandem array of slow MyHC genes. The first slow twitch muscle fibres to differentiate, which are ...

Current has been passed through the cell membrane of muscle fibres of the isolated rabbit right ventricle with the aid of intracellular double-barrelled microelectrodes. Two types of muscle fibres were distinguished which are called P and V fibres. The relation between the intensity of a hyperpolarising current applied during the rising phase and the maximum amplitude of the action potential wa...

1. The superficial muscle fibres in the proximal head of the closer muscle in the crab Eriphia belong to four distinct fibre types (I-IV). By stimulating either the 'slow' or the 'fast' axon, facilitation properties of the EJPs were investigated in eight identifiable muscle fibres which represented the four fibre types. 2. Amount, time course and frequency dependence of facilitation (f) of both...