So these could be strands of collagen right over here and collagen is actually the most common protein in mammals. So I'll do colagen in yellow right over here. And it's made up of a bunch of different types of fibers and proteins and glycoproteins and probably the most notable of these is collagen. So if you assume that this blob right over here is a cell, what I just drew in yellow, that would be its cytoskeleton on the inside, but there's also an analogous thing on the outside that helps coordinate how the cells all relate to each other and that's what we're talking about when we talk about the extracellular matrix. And just as we've talked about the insides of a cell, not just being a bunch of organelles floating around that we have a cytoskeleton that gives the inside of the cell structure and allows it to even, potentially, move and divide and transport things. How do the cells get together, coordinate, structure themselves to form me or you? And the answer is, or at least it involves, something called the extracellular matrix. So all the tissues and organs together, you're going to get the whole organism.
Extracellular matrix full#
How do you go from a different tissue, which of course, eventually, will then get you to a full multi-cellular organism. But how do we go from cells to tissues? So when you know if you look even if you look at your skin, that tissue of your skin, or your tendons or, if you think about heart's tissues or the different organs' tissues.
There's a lot more complexity than many of us might have guessed before really studying cells. As we've seen in other videos, there's whole universes inside of cells. Cells are the basic unit of life and they are fascinating in their own right. We've given a lot of importance to individual cells and that's for good reason.