In Vitro Synthesis of Cellulose in Plants: Still a Long Way to Go!

The major obstacle to studying cellulose synthesis in plants has been the inability to obtain convincing syntheses of this polymer in vitro using membrane preparations from a wide variety of plants. This paper discusses and puts in prospective recent publications by Brown's group (Li and Brown, 1993; Li et al., 1993; Okuda et al., 1993) which report in vitro synthesis of cellulose using membrane preparations derived from cotton fibers. The authors concur that it seems possible to synthesize a limited amount of ([beta])-1,4-glucan in vitro. However, they feel it unlikely that conditions optimal for callose synthesis would also be optimal for cellulose synthesis. The authors conclude that these systems are still far from optimized and that the question of stimulation by cyclic nucleotides and/or other factors requires further extensive investigations. 14 refs.