I decided to talk about something quite different in today’s post. The topic of the day is the flow of water. While it might sound like something completely different, it’s actually something that I thought about for over three years. You see, the flow of oxygen in plants has been known to be linked to lignin, but the exact explanation of how has been quite vague. I won’t even bother to find out what has been said before and just get to the point.
Let’s begin where we left off a while back: to the structure of the lignin-hemicellulose module/cellulose lattice. This is the image that I showed a week ago:
The double-helical brown tubules were monolignols and the white hexagonal prisms were cellulose. I ignored the hemicellulose, because that’s not my specialty. Because of the angle it might not be immediately obvious that while the hexagonal cellulose fills the hexagonal holes in the lattice, nothing happens to the triangular holes between the monolignol nanotubules. While this observation might not mean much to the layperson, for me this immediately rang a major bell. This would explain the mechanism by which lignin allows oxygen to travel long distances in plants.
You see, the Theory of Everything says molecules form supramolecular shells and that in the absence of pressure splitting them, these shells tend to be rather large. In the case of water, the shell, if I recall correctly, is about 2734 nanometers. This means that absent pressure, water is present as rather bulky spheres. In liquid water, these spheres are filled with more water, and are surrounded by donut-shaped (toroidal) shells of water, deformed by the pressure that allows the liquid state. That is: in the absence of pressure, you go directly from gas to solid.
So, if there was almost no space for water to travel, the speed of water being pumped from the roots to the leaves would be extremely sluggish. However, these triangular openings are large enough, but not too large either, for water to move as elongated shells of vapor. Vapor being a hollow supramolecular shell of water.
Below is my very rough illustration of the phenomenon, with water vapor being depicted as transparent blue ‘cigars. From above it is quite easy to see the triangular holes.
However, the best way to observe water vapor is to look from the side:
Of course, the lattice of interlinked lignin nanotubules, as well as the cellulose hexagons and vapor cylinders should extend to near infinity in all directions. However, this is a doodle that probably took me thirty minutes to add the water vapor in, so apologies for the imperfection.
So how close is this model to reality? My hunch is “incredibly close” Probably the biggest ‘error’ is that the cigar shape assumes water vapor to have a very ‘sharp’ tip, whereas the truer shape will probably look like an elongated hourglass, a bit like this image I found by quick googling:
This allows water vapor to pass through the triangular opening without much pressure. Of course, with woody structures the narrowest part of the hourglass would be highly elongated.
These are my current musing. I’ll have to think about whether I’ll add this into the Theory of Lignin manuscript. It’ll probably go to the supplementary information because it’s a bit more hypothetical than the main theory. But you can sure make cool-looking picture out of it.
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