What it does
A tissue is a group of similar cells working together on one job. Under a microscope, each tissue has a few tell-tale features: thick corners on its cell walls, stripes across its fibres, rings around a canal. Learn those features and you can name a tissue at a glance.
This page has simple drawings of 15 tissues:
- Plant: meristematic tissue, parenchyma, collenchyma, sclerenchyma, xylem, phloem, and epidermis with stomata.
- Animal: squamous and columnar epithelium, blood, bone, striated (skeletal), smooth and cardiac muscle, and nervous tissue (a neuron).
In Explore, pick a tissue and tap its numbered dots to see the features that give it away, where it is found and what it does. In Identify, the page shows a drawing with no name and four choices; after you answer, the features appear so you can see what you should have spotted. A table compares the three kinds of muscle side by side.
It follows the Class 9 science chapter Tissues in Action and helps with the Class 11 chapters on plant anatomy and animal tissues. Single cells and their parts are in cell explorer, water moving up through xylem is in transpiration lab, and how meristem cells divide is in cell division.
How to use it
- Explore: tap a tissue name. Tap a numbered dot on the drawing (or a feature in the list) to highlight it.
- Read Where it is found and What it does.
- Identify: press the Identify button. Choose one of the four names. A green answer is right; if you pick wrong, the right one turns green too. Press Next drawing.
- Use the Muscle types compared table to learn striated, smooth and cardiac muscle together.
A worked example
The page opens on parenchyma. Its three clues are: (1) small spaces between the round cells, (2) thin cell walls, (3) a large vacuole with the nucleus pushed to one side. Now tap Collenchyma: the cells fit closely and their walls are thick only at the corners (dark blobs). Tap Sclerenchyma: the walls are thick all round and the cells have only a tiny empty space inside, because they are dead.
So the three simple plant tissues line up as: thin walls everywhere (parenchyma), thick corners (collenchyma), thick everywhere (sclerenchyma).
Tips
- Plant or animal? Plant cells have walls, so their outlines are firm and often six-sided. Animal tissues have no walls.
- Muscles: stripes and many edge nuclei mean striated; no stripes and spindles mean smooth; stripes with branches and dark cross lines (intercalated discs) mean cardiac.
- Blood is the only tissue here whose cells float in a liquid.
Check yourself
Four fresh questions, each a clue with four names to choose from. Nothing is saved.
FAQ
Are these real microscope pictures? No. They are simplified drawings that show the features clearly. Real slides are stained and less tidy.
Is this the NCERT book? No. It covers the same topics with fibub’s own drawings and words. fibub is not part of NCERT.
Where the numbers come from
- Tissue types, their features, where they are found and what they do are standard school biology. All drawings are fibub's own simplified diagrams (not micrographs) and all text was written for fibub.
- A teaching model only: real tissues vary, and stained slides look different.
Standard scientific values, such as constants, atomic weights and melting points, are facts found in every textbook; we name where ours were checked. If you are an author or publisher and want a value, a credit or a table changed or removed, tell us and we will act quickly.
Last updated 2026-11-09.