Acetobacter xylinum cellulose biosynthesis

Although cellulose is the most abundant polysaccharide in plants, attempts to elucidate the mechanism of its biosynthesis have proved to be surprisingly difficult. However, considerable progress has been achieved with the cellulose-forming bacterium Acetobacter xylinum. 

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Yasutake Y, Kawano S, Tajima K, Yao M, Satoh Y, Munekata M, Tanaka I (2006) Structural characterization of the Acetobacter xylinum endo-beta-l,4-glucanase CMCax required fru cellulose biosynthesis. Proteins 64 1069-1077... 

Before going into detailed descriptions about the CSAS application to explore the cellulose self-assembly, let us first briefly describe some common features of the two synthetic routes. The artificial synthesis of cellulose to be discussed here, which was first reported by Kobayashi et involves the enzymatic polymerization of the special substrate monomer at a specific reaction site of the so-called cleft in cellulase used as a catalytic enzyme that will be detailed in Section 2.13.3. The biosynthesis of cellulose involves also the enzymatic polymerization of uridine diphosphate glucose (UDP-glucose) at the specific reaction sites of the so-called terminal complex (TC) on the outer membrane of cytoplasm of bacteria genera Acetobacter xylinum (AX)In both systems, the synthesized cellulose molecules are self-assembled in situ in the reaction medium. 

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