Chapter 4: Tissues

Welcome back, students! This week we are going to go over the basics of Tissues in the human body! There are 4 main types of tissue; Epithelial, connective, muscle, and nerve. 

First, lets talk about Epithelial tissue. There are 3 types of Epithelial tissue; Cutaneous, mucus and serous. The cutaneous type is the tissue of your skin. The mucus tissue is the type of tissue that lines your viscera for example your digestive and respiratory track . Serous is the membrane sound in you ventral body cavity (remember the ventral body cavity is the cavities that house your organs). The main functions of the epithelial tissue is to supported by connective tissue, contains no blood vessels but supplied by nerve fibers, and regenerative. It is important that Epithelial tissue is regenerative because this function rapidly produces more skin cells if you ever get a cut or scrap. 

Second, Connective Tissue is the most abundant and widely distributed out of all the different types of tissue. There is proper connective tissue which is dense tissue and there is special tissue. The connective special tissue are the blood, cartilage, and bone tissue. The main functions of this tissue is support, protection, insulin and transportation. These special tissues have special cells chondroblasts for cartilage, osteoblasts for bones, and hematopoietic stem cells for blood. 

The muscle and nerve fiber are the least abundant type but that does not mean they arent important! Nervous tissue has branched neurons with long cellular process and support cells. Nervous tissue transmit electrical signals from sensory receptors and effectors (what we learned about a few blogs back!). Muscle tissue has two different types, skeletal and cardiac. The skeletal tissue is long with multiple nuclei. This particular tissue initiates and controls the voluntary movement in the body. The Cardiac muscle tissue is branchy with only one nucleus and also has interlocking discs that work as gap junctions. The function of the cardiac muscle tissue, as you may of guessed, pumps blood into the circulation. This type of tissue is found on the walls of the heart.

I hope this breakdown of the different types of tissues makes reading or rereading chapter 4 in the Human Anatomy and Physiology book!

Good Luck on your first semester exams!

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