Polysaccharides unit length

Cellulose is a linear polymer (polysaccharide) made up of glucose monomers. Figure 46 shows the molecule structure of cellulose. It has a degree of polymerisation (DP) on average 10 000 glucose units, which corresponds to a length of 5 im. The chemical formula for cellulose is usually written as [(CgHjjO,) ]. [64,65]... 

Unlike proteins, polysaccharides generally do not have definite molecular weights. This difference is a consequence of the mechanisms of assembly of the two types of polymers. As we shall see in Chapter 27, proteins are synthesized on a template (messenger RNA) of defined sequence and length, by enzymes that follow the template exactly. For polysaccharide synthesis there is no template rather, the program for polysaccharide synthesis is intrinsic to the enzymes that catalyze the polymerization of the monomeric units, and there is no specific stopping point in the synthetic process. 

Cellulose is an unbranched polysaccharide consisting of 1,4-linked 3-D-glucose and can attain lengths of up to 15000 pyranose units. It neither dissolves nor swells in most solvents, but can be hydrolyzed upon prolonged treatment with acids. Cellulose powder was the first type of support to be used (with limited success) for solid-phase peptide synthesis [208]. Limitations were mainly due to the low loading (0.1 mmol/g) attained in these initial experiments, and the high reactivity of cellulose. Despite these... 

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