Practice question · Multiple choice
Both muscle and nervous tissue are classified as excitable, yet they produce fundamentally different biological outcomes upon stimulation. What physiological event do they share, and why does their downstream function diverge?
Hints
- What does the initial definition of an excitable tissue actually require both cell types to do?
- How does each tissue type translate that initial membrane event into its unique mechanical or signalling role?
Show the answer
B. Membrane potential shifts trigger sliding filaments in one and axon conduction in the other
Why
Excitability refers strictly to the electrical response at the plasma membrane. Divergence occurs because muscle couples this electrical event to mechanical cross-bridge cycling via sliding filaments, whereas nervous tissue channels it into propagating signals along an axon.
Practise Muscle and Nervous Tissue
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Biology I is free to start.
More questions on Muscle and Nervous Tissue
- A myelinated axon conducts at 100 m/s while an unmyelinated one of similar diameter conducts at 1 m/s. How…
- During muscle contraction the actin and myosin filaments themselves become shorter.
- Striation reflects the sarcomere arrangement, not the control system, which is why cardiac muscle is striated…
- Match each conduction strategy to its consequence.
- A muscle is stretched to 1.6 times its optimal sarcomere length, well beyond the point of useful filament…
- Arrange these events of skeletal muscle contraction in order.