Juan Du, Venu Gopal Vandavasi, Kelly R Molloy, Hui Yang, Lynnicia N Massenburg, Abhishek Singh, Albert L Kwansa, Yaroslava G Yingling, Hugh O'Neill, Brian T Chait, Manish Kumar, B Tracy Nixon
Higher plants synthesize cellulose using membrane-bound, six-lobed cellulose synthase complexes, each lobe containing trimeric cellulose synthases (CESAs). Although molecular biology reports support heteromeric trimers composed of different isoforms, a homomeric trimer was reported for in vitro studies of the catalytic domain of CESA1 of Arabidopsis (AtCESA1CatD) and confirmed in cryoEM structures of full-length CESA8 and CESA7 of poplar and cotton, respectively. In both structures, a small portion of the plant-conserved region (P-CR) forms the only contacts between catalytic domains of the monomers...
August 10, 2022: Biomacromolecules