Scientists witness living plant cells generate cellulose and form cell walls for the first time
In a groundbreaking study on the synthesis of cellulose—a major constituent of all plant cell walls—a team of
Rutgers University-New Brunswick researchers have captured images of the microscopic process of cell-wall building continuously over 24 hours with living plant cells, providing critical insights that may lead to the development of more robust plants for increased food and lower-cost biofuels production.
The discovery, published in the journal Science Advances, reveals a dynamic process never seen before and may provide practical applications for everyday products derived from plants, including enhanced textiles, biofuels, biodegradable plastics, and new medical products.
The research is also expected to contribute to the fundamental knowledge while providing a new understanding of the formation of cell walls, the scientists said.
It represents over six years of effort and collaboration among three laboratories from differing but complementary academic disciplines at
Rutgers: the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering, and the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.
"This work is the first direct visualization of how cellulose synthesizes and self-assembles into a dense fibril network on a plant cell surface, since Robert Hook's first microscopic observation of cell walls in 1667," said Sang-Hyuk Lee, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and an author of the study.
"This study also provides entirely new insights into how simple, basic physical mechanisms such as diffusion and self-organization may lead to the formation of complex cellulose networks in cells."
The microscope-generated video images show protoplasts—cells with their walls removed—of cabbage's cousin, the flowering plant Arabidopsis, chaotically sprouting filaments of cellulose fibers that gradually self-assemble into a complex network on the outer cell surface.
"I was very surprised by the emergence of ordered structures out of the chaotic dance of molecules when I first saw these video images," said Lee, who is also a faculty member at the Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine. "I thought plant cellulose would be made in a lot more of an organized fashion, as depicted in classical biology textbooks."
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