Fig. 5. Organisation of appendicular muscles and tendons. (A,B,H,I) Computer assisted 3D reconstruction of muscles and tendons from 55-hour APF whole-mount legs expressing muscle-specific MHC-tauGFP (green) and tendon-specific 1151-driven DsRED (red). A,B and H,I show muscles and tendons of the tibia and femur, respectively. (C,E-G) Dissected adult tibia muscles from MHC-tauGFP legs. (D) A view of the tibia muscles from a whole-mounted MHC-tauGFP adult leg. In C, D and F, tendons (red) are revealed by their strong autofluorescence. (E) MHC-tauGFP depressor muscle fibres stained with propidium iodide (PI) to show the nuclei (red) within the syncytial myotubes. (F,G) A higher accumulation of MHC-tauGFP is seen in the tarsus levator (talm) compared with in the tarsus depressor (tadm) muscle. (J-P) Dissected adult femur muscles expressing MHC-tauGFP. (J) General view of muscles (green) and tendons (red) of the femur dissected from MHC-tauGFP/1151-DsRED leg stained with PI to reveal the nuclei (yellow). A neural ganglion of the femur (fng) associated with the long tendon (lt) is indicated. (K) Tibia levator muscle (tilm). (L) Long tendon (lt)-associated muscle (ltm2). (M) Proximal and (N) distal part of the tibia depressor muscle (tidm). Note that the tibia levator tendon (tilt) shown in K is much larger than the depressor tendon (tidt) shown in M. The opposite is true (C) for the tarsus levator (talt) and depressor (tadt) tendons. (O,P) Tibia reductor muscle fibres (tirm). The nuclei in K, L and N are stained with PI and appear yellow. (M) Note the alignment of sarcomeres in neighbouring tidm fibres. (P) An enlarged view of a tibia depressor fibre (tidm), showing two rows of peripherally located nuclei. All muscle and tendon names and corresponding abbreviations are defined in Table 1.