Loading…

Regiospecific Cellulose Orientation and Anisotropic Mechanical Property in Plant Cell Walls

Cellulose microfibrils (CMFs) are a major load-bearing component in plant cell walls. Thus, their structures have been studied extensively with spectroscopic and microscopic characterization methods, but the findings from these two approaches were inconsistent, which hampers the mechanistic understa...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biomacromolecules 2023-11, Vol.24 (11), p.4759-4770
Main Authors: Lee, Jongcheol, Choi, Juseok, Feng, Luyi, Yu, Jingyi, Zheng, Yunzhen, Zhang, Qian, Lin, Yen-Ting, Sah, Saroj, Gu, Ying, Zhang, Sulin, Cosgrove, Daniel J., Kim, Seong H.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Cellulose microfibrils (CMFs) are a major load-bearing component in plant cell walls. Thus, their structures have been studied extensively with spectroscopic and microscopic characterization methods, but the findings from these two approaches were inconsistent, which hampers the mechanistic understanding of cell wall mechanics. Here, we report the regiospecific assembly of CMFs in the periclinal wall of plant epidermal cells. Using sum frequency generation spectroscopic imaging, we found that CMFs are highly aligned in the cell edge region where two cells form a junction, whereas they are mostly isotropic on average throughout the wall thickness in the flat face region of the epidermal cell. This subcellular-level heterogeneity in the CMF alignment provided a new perspective on tissue-level anisotropy in the tensile modulus of cell wall materials. This finding also has resolved a previous contradiction between the spectroscopic and microscopic imaging studies, which paves a foundation for better understanding of the cell wall architecture, especially structure–geometry relationships.
ISSN:1525-7797
1526-4602
DOI:10.1021/acs.biomac.3c00538