As the most abundant biopolymer on Earth, cellulose is a key structural component of the plant cell wall. Cellulose is produced at the plasma membrane by cellulose synthase (CesA) complexes (CSCs), which are assembled in the endomembrane system and trafficked to the plasma membrane. While several proteins that affect CesA activity have been identified, components that regulate CSC assembly and ...

In higher plants, cellulose is synthesized at the plasma membrane by the cellulose synthase (CESA) complex. The catalytic core of the complex is believed to be composed of three types of CESA subunits. Indirect evidence suggests that the complex associated with primary wall cellulose deposition consists of CESA1, -3, and -6 in Arabidopsis thaliana. However, phenotypes associated with mutations ...

In a screen to identify novel cellulose deficient mutants, three lines were shown to be allelic and define a novel complementation group, irregular xylem5 (irx5). IRX5 was cloned and encodes a member of the CesA family of cellulose synthase catalytic subunits (AtCesA4). irx5 plants have an identical phenotype to previously described mutations in two other members of this gene family (IRX1 and I...

Prostaglandin endoperoxide E isomerase catalyzes the isomerization of the endoperoxy group of prostaglandin H and produces prostaglandin E. The enzyme was solubilized with Tween 20 from bovine vesicular gland microsomes and purified 26-fold by successive column chromatography on DEAE-cellulose and omega-aminobutyl Sepharose 4B. The previously known requirement for glutathione was further invest...

Cell-free preparations of the bacterium Acetobacter xylinum were first reported to synthesize cellulose from UDP-Glc over 40 years ago (Glaser, 1958). Despite the elucidation of the primary sequence of the cellulose synthase from this organism in 1990 (Wong et al., 1990), a consistent mechanism to account for the biosynthesis of this and related polysaccharides has remained elusive. Opposing vi...

Cellulose is intimately associated with multiple facets of human civilization: central to clothing, shelter, heat, medicine, and food, there are fewmoments in the average human life that are not spent in direct contact with cellulose or a by-product of its composition. It should come as no surprise then that a considerable amount of time and energy have been spent, and a couple of Nobel Prizes ...

Coexpression patterns of gene expression across many microarray data sets may reveal networks of genes involved in linked processes. To identify factors involved in cellulose biosynthesis, we used a regression method to analyze 408 publicly available Affymetrix Arabidopsis microarrays. Expression of genes previously implicated in cellulose synthesis, as well as several uncharacterized genes, wa...

The plant cell wall is a complex structure consisting of a variety of polymers including cellulose, xyloglucan, xylan and polygalacturonan. Biochemical and genetic analysis has made it possible to clone genes encoding cellulose synthases (CesA). A comparison of the predicted protein sequences in the Arabidopsis genome indicates that 30 divergent genes with similarity to CesAs exist. It is possi...

Alkyldihydroxyacetone-P (alkyl-DHAP) synthase, the enzyme that forms the ether linkage of alkyl and alk-1-enyl glycerolipids, has been solubilized from ehrlich ascites cell microsomes using Triton X-100 and acetone precipitation. the solubilized enzyme, which is stabilized by glycerol or ethylene glycol, was then purified further by chromatography on DEAE-cellulose, QAE-Sephadex, Matrex Red, an...