Polysaccharides atomic force microscopy

Rief, M., Oeslerhelt, F., Heymann, B. and Gaub, H.E., Single molecule force spectroscopy on polysaccharides by atomic force microscopy. Science, 275(5304), 1295-1297 (1997). 

Morris VJ, Gunnig AP, Kirby AR, Waldron K, Ng A. Atomic force microscopy of plant cell walls, plant cell wall polysaccharides and gels.JBiolMacromol 1997 21 61-66. 

Marszalek PE, Li H, Oberhauser AE, Eemandez JM. Chair-boat transitions in single polysaccharide molecules observed with force-ramp atomic force microscopy. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2002 99 4278-4283. 

Examination of moist, isolated potato cell walls using atomic force microscopy (AFM) showed the cellulose microfibrils as an interwoven network (Kirby et al., 1996,2006). Although accurate height measurements of cellulose microfibrils have not been obtained using AFM on potato cell walls, they have on similar parenchyma cell-wall preparations from onion (Allium cepa) and Arabidopsis thaliana (Davies and Harris, 2003). These studies showed that the microfibrils were 4-6 nm in diameter, and reduced to 3.2 nm (A. thaliana) when extracted to remove some of the non-cellulosic polysaccharides. 

Santschi, P.H., Balnois, E., Wilkinson, K., Zhang, J., Buffle, J. and Guo, L. (1998) Fibrillar polysaccharides in marine macromolecular organic matter as imaged by atomic force microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Limnol. Oceanogr., 43, 896-908. 

Polysaccharide chains on the surface of cellulose visualized by atomic force microscopy. [Courtesy of M. Miles from A. A. Baker et... 

Piotr E. Marzalek, Hongbin Li, Julio M. Ferrrandez, Fingerprinting polysaccharides with single-molecrrle atomic force microscopy. Nature Biotechnology, 19 (2001), 258-262. 

Gad, M., Itoh, A., and Ikai, A. 1997. Mapping cell wall polysaccharides of living microbial cells using atomic force microscopy. Cell Biol Int 21,697-706. 

Grunnert M, Wintm WT (2002) Nanocomposites of cellulose acetate butyrate reinforced with cellulose nanociystals. Polym Environ 10 27-30 Guhados G, Wan WK, Hutter JL (2005) Measurement of the elastic modulus of single bacterial cellulose fibres using atomic force microscopy. Langmuir 21 6642-6646 Habibi Y, Dufi-esne A (2008) Highly filled bionanocomposites fi-om functionalized polysaccharide nanocrystals. Biomacromolecules 9 1974-1980... 

Especially close to the transition lines the structures are easily interconvertible. At the transition line between torus and globule other intermediate structures like disks and rods are also found at a significant percentage. This agrees well with recent findings from atomic force microscopy studies of collapsed DNA and polysaccharide chains [33]. 

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