Aside from being the primary building material for plants, cellulose has many others uses. According to how it is treated, cellulose can be used to make paper, film, explosives, and plastics, in addition to having many other industrial uses. The paper in this book contains cellulose, as do some of the clothes you are wearing. For humans, cellulose is also a major source of needed fiber in our diet.
Cellulose is usually described by chemists and biologists as a complex carbohydrate pronounced car-bow-HI-drayt. Carbohydrates are organic compounds made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that function as sources of energy for living things. Plants are able to make their own carbohydrates that they use for energy and to build their cell walls. According to how many atoms they have, there are several different types of carbohydrates, but the simplest and most common in a plant is glucose.
Plants make glucose formed by photosynthesis to use for energy or to store as starch for later use. A plant uses glucose to make cellulose when it links many simple units of glucose together to form long chains. These long chains are called polysaccharides meaning "many sugars". Scanning electron micrograph of wood cellulose.
Reproduced by permission of Phototake. It is because of these long molecules that cellulose is insoluble or does not dissolve easily in water. These long molecules also are formed into a criss-cross mesh that gives strength and shape to the cell wall.
Thus while some of the food that a plant makes when it converts light energy into chemical energy photosynthesis is used as fuel and some is stored, the rest is turned into cellulose that serves as the main building material for a plant. Cellulose is ideal as a structural material since its fibers give strength and toughness to a plant's leaves, roots, and stems. Since cellulose is the main building material out of which plants are made, and plants are the primary or first link in what is known as the food chain which describes the feeding relationships of all living things , cellulose is a very important substance.
It was first isolated in by the French chemist Anselme Payen — , who earlier had isolated the first enzyme. While studying different types of wood, Payen obtained a substance that he knew was not starch glucose or sugar in its stored form , but which still could be broken down into its basic units of glucose just as starch can. He named this new substance "cellulose" because he had obtained it from the cell walls of plants. Carbohydrate: A compound consisting of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen found in plants and used as a food by humans and other animals.
Glucose: Also known as blood sugar; a simple sugar broken down in cells to produce energy. Photosynthesis: Chemical process by which plants containing chlorophyll use sunlight to manufacture their own food by converting carbon dioxide and water to carbohydrates, releasing oxygen as a by-product.
As the chief constituent or main ingredient of the cell walls of plants, cellulose performs a structural or skeletal function. Just as our hard, bony skeletons provide attachment points for our muscles and support our bodies, so the rigidity or stiffness found in any plant is due to the strength of its cell walls.
Examined under a powerful microscope, fibers of cellulose are seen to have a meshed or criss-cross pattern that looks as if it were woven much as cloth. The cell wall has been likened to the way reinforced concrete is made, with the cellulose fibers acting as the rebars or steel rods do in concrete providing extra strength. As the new cell grows, layer upon layer of new material is deposited inside the last layer, meaning that the oldest material is always on the outside of the plant.
Cellulose is one of the most widely used natural substances and has become one of the most important commercial raw materials. The major sources of cellulose are plant fibers cotton, hemp, flax, and jute are almost all cellulose and, of course, wood about 42 percent cellulose.
Since cellulose is insoluble in water, it is easily separated from the other constituents of a plant. Cellulose has been used to make paper since the Chinese first invented the process around A. Cellulose is separated from wood by a pulping process that grinds woodchips under flowing water. The pulp that remains is then washed, bleached, and poured over a vibrating mesh.
When the water finally drains from the pulp, what remains is an interlocking web of fibers that, when dried, pressed, and smoothed, becomes a sheet of paper. Raw cotton is 91 percent cellulose, and its fiber cells are found on the surface of the cotton seed. There are thousands of fibers on each seed, and as the cotton pod ripens and bursts open, these fiber cells die. Because these fiber cells are primarily cellulose, they can be twisted to form thread or yarn that is then woven to make cloth.
Since cellulose reacts easily to both strong bases and acids, a chemical process is often used to make other products.
For example, the fabric known as rayon and the transparent sheet of film called cellophane are made using a many-step process that involves an acid bath. In mixtures if nitric and sulfuric acids, cellulose can form what is called guncotton or cellulose nitrates that are used for explosives. However, when mixed with camphor, cellulose produces a plastic known as celluloid, which was used for early motion-picture film.
However, because it was highly flammable meaning it could easily catch fire , it was eventually replaced by newer and more stable plastic materials.
Although cellulose is still an important natural resource, many of the products that were made from it are being produced easier and cheaper using other materials. Despite the fact that humans and many other animals cannot digest cellulose meaning that their digestive systems cannot break it down into its basic constituents , cellulose is nonetheless a very important part of the healthy human diet.
This is because it forms a major part of the dietary fiber that we know is important for proper digestion. Since we cannot break cellulose down and it passes through our systems basically unchanged, it acts as what we call bulk or roughage that helps the movements of our intestines. Among mammals, only those that are ruminants cudchewing animals like cows and horses can process cellulose. This is because they have special bacteria and microorganisms in their digestive tracts that do it for them.
They are then able to absorb the broken-down cellulose and use its sugar as a food source. Fungi are also able to break down cellulose into sugar that they can absorb, and they play a major role in the decomposition rotting of wood and other plant material. Toggle navigation. Photo by: alexonline. Words to Know Carbohydrate: A compound consisting of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen found in plants and used as a food by humans and other animals.
Also read article about Cellulose from Wikipedia. Cellulose belongs to a group of polysaccharide carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are organic compound s comprised of carbon , hydrogen , and oxygen , usually in the ratio of They are one of the major classes of biomolecule s. Polysaccharide are carbohydrates made up of multiple saccharide units.
Some of them serve as energy fuel e. In , French chemist Anselme Payen — was able to isolate cellulose from a plant matter. Cellulose is biodegradable, odorless, and has no taste. It is a straight chain polymer of carbohydrates. It is an organic compound just as the other carbohydrates. It is made up of a linear chain of multiple glucose residues e.
The hydroxyl groups on the glucose from on one chain connect by hydrogen bonds with the oxygen atoms on the glucose on another or the same chain. No glycosidic bonds occur in between the chains. Hydrogen bonds are the ones holding the chains together, side-by-side. Thus, cellulose appears as a microfibril. The other properties of cellulose depend on the length of the chain or on the degree of polymerization. Cellulose is similar to starch in being comprised of several glucose monomers.
Also, cellulose is a straight polymer. It lacks coiling and branches that are present in starch. Cellulose forms a rather rigid, rod-like conformation. Both of them are biosynthesized by plants. However, plants produce starch primarily as storage carbohydrate.
Cellulose is produced by plants chiefly as a cell wall component. Cellulose is a structural component of the primary cell wall of vascular plants as well as of many algae and oomycetes. Cellulose is the most abundant natural polysaccharide followed by chitin. Their difference is on the monosaccharide constituents: cellulose is comprised of D-glucose whereas chitin is a polymer of N -acetyl-D-glucosamine monomers.
Chitin has an acetylamine group instead of a hydroxyl group on each monomer. This enables more opportunities of hydrogen bonding between polymers in chitin. Therefore, compared with cellulose, chitin is a tougher polysaccharide, more so when combined with calcium carbonate in a composite material. Hemicellulose is another polysaccharide in the plant cell walls. Both hemicellulose and cellulose are polysaccharides but hemicellulose is made by the polymerization of not just glucose.
Hemicellulose also contains xylose , galactose , mannose , rhamnose , and arabinose. Moreover, hemicellulose is a branched, cross-linked polymer whereas cellulose is unbranched, straight-chain polymer. They also differ in the way they are synthesized. Cellulose is produced naturally by other forms of organisms aside from plants. It is found to be produced by certain bacteria, protists, algae, and animals e.
The cyanobacteria are presumed to be the first organism to produce cellulose. It is synthesized by the proteinaceous structure called rosette terminal complex floating at the plasma membrane. The complex contains cellulose synthases , which are involved in the synthesis of cellulose chain. The cellulose biosynthetic pathway uses glucose as the precursor. The matrix, in turn, contains various glycoprotein s and other polysaccharide s.
In bacteria, cellulose is produced as a constituent of a biofilm. A biofilm is a microbial community that is stabilized by an extracellular matrix of polysaccharides, proteins, and nucleic acids.
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