 Hi, guys. Today's topic is skeletal muscle, which is the effector in the somatic nervous system. So all somatic motor neurons or fibers innervate skeletal muscle. And just like all the other times that we're messing with nervous system, we need to remind ourselves of the big picture. And this time, I'm going to focus in just on the somatic motor pathway. So let's go ahead and draw a little central nervous system in here. Right? Sure. It's a little dusty over here. And let's draw our effector in, shall we? And you tell me, after the visceral motor autonomic nervous system lecture that we just had, do you feel like do you have a sense of what we're going to draw or the new information you might get out of this part of the lecture? Hopefully, you're thinking, yeah, heck yeah. Because we're going to have some sort of somatic motor neuron. We know this because the neuron is reaching out to innervate a skeletal muscle. If you remember from your anatomy days, the cell body of this somatic motor neuron is actually inside the anterior gray horn at the spinal cord, and then it passes through a spinal nerve and out to the muscle that it's going to innervate. The question that you probably should be asking is, okay, what neurotransmitters and receptors are involved in this pathway? And if you remember from the last time, remember color coding from the last time? I don't even know if I remember color coding from the last time. Here's the scoop, my friends. All somatic motor neurons are a single neuron. The pathway is just one neuron. All of them dump acetylcholine into the synapse where the acetylcholine binds with nicotinic acetylcholine and the receptors on the skeletal muscle. And those receptors are actually found in a specific area of the skeletal muscle. It's called the motor end plate. And I want you to remember it exists. It's actually like if you imagine a skeletal muscle cell, which you can't really imagine it right now because we haven't talked about it, but it's like this super folded area where the skeletal muscle cells cell membrane. And it looks like that. And it's called the motor end plate. And that's where you have little acetylcholine receptors. I think they were little circle ones that I drew from the last time. Isn't that cool? That's skeletal muscle. So before we do anything else, we need to know what is a skeletal muscle cell that they really look like? Because they're really bizarre cells in your body. And they're bizarre because they have all these weird structures that enable their crazy function of being able to contract and shorten. So let's go figure out what's the scoop with these skeletal muscle cells.