This video, we're going to be going over the anatomy of a neuron and all neurons pretty much have the same basic parts. So, all neurons have a soma or a cell body. This is going to be similar to any other cell body that you've ever learned about in a bio class. It will contain the nucleus and the organelles of these cells. So it contains the DNA and any of the biochemical machinery needed to keep the neuron alive.
So if we're looking at our neuron here, this kind of large portion of it with that nucleus right in the center is going to be our soma. Okay, so that is our cell body, it's keeping our cell alive, and all neurons also have structures called dendrites and dendrites are going to be the part of our neuron that receives chemical messages from other neurons. Okay. So they are going to be receiving signals from other neurons and most neurons will have multiple dendrites, not all but most. So you can see here kind of coming off of our soma, we have all of these structures and all of these are dendrites.
So basically each of these dendrites is going to be making a connection with a neighboring neuron and when that neuron sends a signal the dendrites are going to be receiving that message, basically. Now, all neurons also have an axon and the axon is going to be the part of the neuron that sends messages to other neurons. Okay. So this is a really important takeaway point, is that dendrites receive signals and axons send signals. Now, unlike with dendrites, neurons have 1 axon.
However, that one axon can have multiple branches at the end and those are called axon terminals. So if we are looking at our diagram here you can see coming off of our soma we have this very long structure here that is our axon. And you can see our axon is covered in those kind of like bluish gray blobs. Don't worry about that yet, we'll talk about that in a future video. But you can see at the end our axon is branching off and each of those branches is called an axon terminal.
Now axon terminals end in what we call terminal buttons. So at the end of each axon terminal is kind of like a little bulbous structure, and those terminal buttons contain something called vesicles, which are very similar to, like, sacs and those vesicles, or those sacs, are filled with neurotransmitters. So if we are looking at our axon terminals you can see we have these kind of like little bulbous structures at the end of each one. Each of those would be a terminal button. Okay?
And if we were to kind of zoom in on a terminal button and open it up we would see all of these little sacs and those sacs are the vesicles. And those little triangles inside the vesicles would represent the neurotransmitters. So just to give you, like, a very general sense of what a typical neural signal might look like, we would basically be receiving a message from other neurons over here, via our dendrites. We would receive a message that would travel down the dendrite, down the soma, and then our neuron would fire something called an action potential. We'll learn all about those very soon.
So that is basically an electrical signal that will then travel down our axon, down the axon terminal to the terminal button, which would trigger the release of neurotransmitters, which would then send the message to any neighboring neurons. Okay? So we are receiving information over here on the dendrite end and then we are sending that signal to neighboring neurons over there on the axon end. Alright, so that is the basic anatomy of a neuron and I will see you guys in our next video. Bye bye.