Comparison of macromolecular interactions in the cell walls of hardwood, softwood and maize by fluorescence and FTIR spectroscopy, differential polarization laser scanning microscopy and X-ray diffraction

Abstract

We compared interactions between macromolecules in the cell walls of different plant origin, namely spruce wood (Picea omorika (Pančić) Purkiňe) as an example of softwood, maple wood (Acer platanoides L.) -a hardwood and maize stems (Zea mays L.) -a herbaceous plant from the grass family and widely used agricultural plant. We compared macromolecules' interactions in isolated cell walls from the three species by using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and fluorescence spectroscopy. We also observed linear dichroism of the cell walls by using Differential Polarization Laser Scanning Microscope (DP-LSM), which provides information of macromolecular order. This method has not been previously used for comparison of the cell walls of various plant origins. It was shown that the maize cell walls have higher amount of hydrogen bonds that lead to more regular packing of cellulose molecules, simpler structure of lignin, and to a higher crystallinity of the cell wall in relation to the walls of woody plants. DP-LSM and fluorescence spectroscopy results indicate that maize has simpler and more ordered structure than both woody species. The results of this work provide new data for comparison of the cell wall properties that may be important for selection of appropriate plant for possible applications as a source of biomass.This may be a contribution to development of efficient deconstruction and separation technologies that enable release of sugar and aromatic compounds from the cell wall macromolecular structure.3

Differential Polarization Imaging of Plant Cells. Mapping the Anisotropy of Cell Walls and Chloroplasts

“…Taking advantage of the high precision, quantitative FDLD values obtained from DP-LSM imaging ( Figure 7 ), anisotropic features of different plant cell walls (hardwood: maple— Acer platanoides L., softwood: spruce— Picea omorika (Pančic) Purkyne and maize— Zea mays L.) can be compared [ 51 ]. This was performed via analysing the distribution of FDLD values indicating the degree of order in the cell walls.…”

“…The blue and yellow regions in FDLD images are for the horizontal and the vertical dipole orientations, respectively. (Reproduced in colour from [ 51 ], with permission from Springer Nature).…”

Impact of birch xylan composition and structure on film formation and properties

“…The successive substitution of hydroxyl groups by acetyl groups during acetylation was confirmed by the FTIR spectra based on the emergence and/or the increasing intensity of the band at 1740 cm −1 (C=O stretching) and the decrease in the intensity of vibrations in the OH-region (around 3750-3000 cm −1 ) (Bian et al 2010;Belmokadden et al 2011) (Figure 1). The OH-region is due to several stretching vibrations of inter-and intra-molecular hydrogen bonds (Popescu et al 2011;Djikanović et al 2016), for example, involving the O(2)H and the O(3)H in the xylan chain. The combination of such vibrations causes a broadening of the OH region in the FTIR spectra (Papescu et al 2011).…”

Probing Effect of Papirindustriens Forskningsinstitut (PFI) Refining on Aggregation Structure of Cellulose: Crystal Packing and Hydrogen-Bonding Network

“…FT-IR deconvolution of hydroxyl groups band was adopted in order to study the changes of the energy of H-bonds and the H-bonding distance during delignification [13] or the deconstruction of cellulose [14]. Moreover, it was used to study the differences of the content of H-bonds not only between dislocation region and normal region [15], but also among plant species [16,17]. Regarding the changes of H-bonding network during PFI refining, Yuan et al [18] reported that the content of H-bonds and crystallinity index (CI) of eucalyptus fibers changed with the increment of beating time.…”