 So let's look at loose connective tissue or sometimes it's called areolar connective tissue and think about its structure and its function. So loose connective tissue as we said earlier is very loosely put together and its general function is to bind structures together. It's found beneath the skin, it's often found connecting one tissue to the next, it's found between different groups of muscle. So loose connective tissue is found in many places throughout the body and it binds structures, tissues together. Let's look at its structure. So I'm going to use the blue dots to represent fibroblast. So fibroblast are the cells that secrete the matrix. So what these fibroblasts will do is they will secrete fibres into this liquid ground substance. So the thin black fibres are the elastic fibres. And earlier we said that the elastic fibres are made out of a protein called elastin and if they have a force applied to them they'll stretch but when you let them go they'll recoil. And the recoil part is important. There are some things that you can stretch and let it go and it won't recoil. For example if I had a piece of chewing gum and I pulled it out and let it go it would just say stay stretched out it wouldn't recoil. So elastic fibres recoil and that helps to give this tissue a lot of its important characteristics. The other thing that the fibroblasts secrete are collagenous fibres and the collagenous fibres are the tough fibres and they're much thicker and they're made of a substance called collagen. So all these fibres are suspended in this liquid ground substance. So the collagenous fibres sort of balance out the elastic fibres and if you take your skin and you pull on your skin you know that you wouldn't want to do this but you'd have to exert a tremendous force in order to pull that skin completely away. And that's because those collagenous fibres in there are very tough and they help hold it all together but at the same time the elastic fibres give you that elastic nature and allows that tissue to stretch to some extent. So loose connective tissue contains both collagenous fibres that make it very tough but at the same time it has an elastic quality that allows it to stretch and recoil. So what we want to do next is look at a micrograph of loose connective tissue and you can see the very structures that we just attempted to draw on this micrograph. For example here is a fibrocyte at this point the fibres have already been secreted so we'll call them fibrocytes and I'm just sort of filling some of these in with the marker. So we have fibrocytes scattered throughout and see the fibrocytes are separated from one another. And then you see we have these elastic fibres and these are just the thin black lines that I'm tracing here. Here are some elastic fibres and then the collagenous fibres are the thicker fibres that we see interspersed through here. And so they're the ones that look sort of like this. So loose connective tissue binds structures together. It's found between muscles. It's found under the skin. It's found in the digestive system just deep to the mucosa. It actually is the major portion of a layer called the submucosa. It's a very good tissue because it has an elastic quality but it's also quite tough.