While my last post was about the quest for the structure of the lignin lattice, today I go back to the ancient days of the time before the theory of everything, and even before the theory of lignin.
As I’ve mentioned, all of this started with me needing to understand the structure of lignin, because without this understanding, it’s night impossible to do proper lignin nanotechnology. Back on first of May (May Day) 2020, I was eating donuts, as we tend to do on May Day in Finland.
I had been toying around with the structure of monolignols before lignification being a flexible nanotubule. I was thinking about the maximum curvature of such a tubule and the means by which it would form a closed loop. And then it hit me: it wouldn’t need to close into a loop, if it had never been open to begin with!
This realization quickly led to the concept of monolignols coming out of the cell membrane as ‘donuts’ of very specific size. But the problem I had was that I didn’t have a really good mechanism for formation of a hexagonal lattice with the donuts.
The problem was that before the realization of the double-helical structure of lignin, I tried to model what happened using circles. At first, I had a very rudimentary model like this:
Which isn’t much, or very convincing when shown to people who are not convinced to begin with. Two years ago I had reached as far as having a preliminary mechanism of the rings folding like they were cards in a deck being shuffled:
This is pretty much the stage where I left this before devoting my time to the Theory of Everything. The challenge this this was that it wasn’t illogical as such but relied on a two-dimensional understanding of the fusing of the toroidosomes.
Only when I started playing around with 3D images in Blender did I have proper tools to visualize my ideas. And in Blender it was obvious that if two (as part of a larger whole) toroidosomes, with multiple loops are pushed together, the toroidosomes need to rotate around an axis that is along the plane of the hexagonal lattice of toroidosomes pushing against each other.
This action cause tension, with the rotating loops pushing against each other. At some point the tension (and the force) of this pushing passes a threshold and the hydrogen bonds at the intersection open. This allows the loops to pass through each other. Once there is no force keeping the loops open, the hydrogen bond reforms and a double-helical nanotubule forms, with the number of knots being equal to the number of loops on one side (or half the total number of loops).
Once these knots have formed, there is a wide hexagonal lattice of interconnected hydrogen-bonded double-helical nanotubules. Like this:
Okay, you might say. This sounds sort of logical, but is there any proof of this? Could you see this with a microscope? As it happens, yes you can, and it’s been known for fourteen years. But the problem is that the resolution of even electron microscopes is so poor that without a good hypothesis of the structure, you end up making some flawed assumptions. Such as the assumption that the lattice is square.
But otherwise, this general structure (sort of) is known and the hexagonal unit has a name: a Hemicellulose lignin module (HLM):
So, if we follow the logic of the above article and add cellulose fibers inside the lattice, we get the image below:
So, is this the solution to the structure of plant life? Pretty much so. I’m going to go back to my old manuscript on the structure of lignin and remove everything that isn’t exactly mandatory and try to rewrite it so that I won’t introduce any controversial concept. I’ll try not to make any comments that aren’t logical and backed by common knowledge, or published literature, or my own experiments.
Again, it might be too radical to publish in Nature, but I’ll still try to do so. And if it gets knocked down by the editor, I’ll just put it into Scientific Reports.
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