Plant Cell Walls

Plant cell walls provide mechanical strength to plant cells while at the same time allowing plants to grow rapidly. Plant cell walls primarily contain three types of polysaccharides: cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectins (Fig. 4A). Although the chemical composition of plant cell walls is relatively well known, the three-dimensional architecture and the dynamics of cell wall polysaccharides have long been elusive due to the lack of high-resolution structural techniques to characterize this insoluble and disordered material.

We are pioneering the application of multidimensional solid-state NMR to elucidate the structures and dynamics of the polysaccharides of intact primary cell walls. By enriching whole plants with 13C, we are able to employ 2D and 3D correlation MAS NMR techniques to detect and resolve the signals of the complex mixture of polysaccharides in intact cell walls (Fig. 4B), and determine their spatial contacts and mobilities. By using sensitivity-enhancing dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) and paramagnetic relaxation enhancement NMR techniques, we elucidate how polysaccharides interact with proteins to loosen the cell walls during growth (Fig. 4C). Using model plants of both dicot (e.g. Arabidopsis thaliana) and grass (e.g. Brachypodium distachyon and Zea mays) families, we have shown that cellulose, hemicellulose and pectins form a single three-dimensional network (Fig. 4D) instead of two separate networks, thus revising the long-held view of the plant cell wall structure. With our collaborators, we also investigate the structural polymorphism of cellulose microfibrils, hydration of wall polysaccharides, interactions of cellulose with matrix polysaccharides, and the effects of genetic mutations on cell-wall structure.