Where Nerve Meets Muscle
These dark blue tubes splattered with red and green are fruit fly muscles. This image shows where the nerves and the muscles meet in the larva of a fly.
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DownloadWhere Nerve Meets Muscle
These dark blue tubes splattered with red and green are fruit fly muscles. This image shows where the nerves and the muscles meet in the larva of a fly.
What am I looking at?
This is a fluorescently labeled image of muscles and nerves, showing where they meet in the larva of a fruit fly. The muscles are in dark blue (1). The nerves (groups of motor neurons) are in red (2). The synapses connecting the two are green (3).
Biology in the background
Fruit fly muscles have a lot in common with human muscles. They respond to signals from the nervous system via connection points called neuromuscular junctions. The nerves send signals to the muscles via neurotransmitters, telling them when to contract.
Muscles are striated, which means that the contractile cells that allow them to move are arranged parallel to each other, forming long muscle fibers. They are also multinucleated, meaning each muscle cell has multiple nuclei, unlike most other cells in the body.
Each of these muscle fibers is about 100 micrometers across, or slightly larger than the width of a human hair.
Technique
This image was created using confocal microscopy.
Y.J. Kim and M. Serpe, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases