Okay, so next let's think about adipose tissue. Adipose tissue has several jobs. One job of adipose tissue is to store fat and fat of course represents an energy source for organ. Gram for gram fat has more energy in it than glucose does. So fat is a good way for organisms to store energy.
But there are other benefits to having adipose tissue. Adipose tissue helps to cushion organs. If you push on your eyes you can tell that they're sort of cushioned and the tissue that's doing that in part is adipose tissue.
There's adipose tissue around your heart, around your kidneys. You may have adipose tissue under your skin and that helps to insulate your body from the cold. So adipose tissue has a variety of functions. The tissue itself isn't incredibly complicated. Adipose cells are very large cells depending upon how much fat they have stored in them.
And the central area of the cell is the fat storage area. And so as the cells accumulate fat, the nucleus of the cell actually gets... pushed over to the side. And so that's pretty much what an adipose cell looks like. And adipose tissue is a little different from a lot of connective tissues in that the cells are closer together.
So when you have a group of adipose cells it sort of looks like air bubbles or spaces within a tissue. You can see this. when we look at a micrograph of some adipose tissue.
Now this is actually a microscope slide of the trachea, and surrounding the trachea we have some adipose tissue, and that just helps to cushion that particular organ. So if we try and trace that, you can see here is an adipose cell, here's an adipose cell. You don't always see the nucleus because it depends on how the cell was sectioned. There's an adipose cell. Here's one, here's one.
So, adipose tissue has a large centralized fat storage area with the nucleus pushed to the side. Functions of adipose tissue include storing fat, fat which is an energy source protecting insulating cushioning etc