Exploiting CELLULOSE SYNTHASE (CESA) class-specificity to probe cellulose microfibril biosynthesis

Manoj Kumar, Laxmi Mishra, Paul Carr, Michael Pilling, Peter Gardner, Shawn D. Mansfield and Simon R. Turner
Plant Physiology (2018)
doi:10.1104/pp.18.00263

Cellulose microfibrils are the basic units of cellulose in plants. The structure of these microfibrils is at least partly determined by the structure of the cellulose synthase complex. In higher plants, this complex is composed of 18 to 24 catalytic subunits known as CELLULOSE SYNTHASE A (CESA) proteins. Three different classes of CESA proteins are required for cellulose synthesis and for secondary cell wall cellulose biosynthesis, which include CESA4, CESA7, and CESA8. To probe the relationship between CESA proteins and microfibril structure, we created mutant cesa proteins that lack catalytic activity but retain sufficient structural integrity to allow assembly of the cellulose synthase complex. Using a series of Arabidopsis mutants and genetic backgrounds, we found consistent differences in the ability of these mutant CESA proteins to complement the cellulose-deficient phenotype of the cesa null mutants. The best complementation was observed with catalytically inactive cesa4 while the equivalent mutation in cesa8 exhibited significantly lower levels of complementation. Using a variety of biophysical techniques, including ssNMR and FTIR, to study these mutant plants we found evidence for changes in cellulose microfibril structure, but these changes largely correlated with cellulose content and reflected differences in the relative proportion of primary and secondary cell walls. Our results suggest that individual CESA classes have similar roles in determining cellulose microfibril structure, and it is likely that the different effects of mutating members of different CESA classes is a consequence of their different catalytic activity and their influence on the overall rate of cellulose synthesis.