In my last post I rather confidently exclaimed that I had figured out the way to knot two monolignol toroidosomes. While there would be nothing wrong with this concept if the two toroidosomes were isolated, I immediately realized that the concept has the small fault that it ignores the hexagonal lattice where this knotting is supposed to take place.
While the above sentence sounds really complicated, it is relatively easy to visualize. This is what the simplest hexagonal lattice shape looks like from above:
Looks okay, right? Only when viewed from above. This is the same shape from the side:
The lattice is no longer aligned at the edges. This means that the only way to form this sort of a twisted lattice is if it is very small.
Also, the model that I showed didn’t really show the steps properly. It had an air of “then a miracle occurs” to it. So, I decided to assume that the hexagonal lattice prevents the toroidosomes from twisting out of the plane of the lattice. In this case the only way for the loops to form knots is for the helices to extend, so that just by shifting the location (and not its shape) of the individual toroidosomes, they can snap together in a knotted lattice. This extension of the helices will inevitably expand the area of the lattice, but there doesn’t seem to be any other way to allow for the knotting. After this snapping shut, the lattice can contract to pretty much the original surface area.
Here is an illustration of the steps:
There are a couple of additional helices in the image, but just ignore them.
But the million-dollar-question is: how do the monolignol toroidosomes knot? To answer that, we must consider the activation energy of the process. The assumption is that just by putting toroidosomes close to each other, nothing really happens. What you need is something that causes the intermediate state to be possible. If you put enough thermal energy into a system, it should happen by itself. But I don’t think the temperature of plant growth (above 7 °C, or 45 °F for those who need it) is sufficient.
Rather, my hypothesis is that there is some sort of synergistic effect with the growth of cellulose and the ‘budding’ of monolignol toroidosomes, where the cellulose fibers grow through the toroidosomes and their vibration inside the toroidosomes sheath causes the neighboring sheathed bundles of cellulose fibers to knot.
I have a faint recollection of reading an article where they were even able to image something like this. But because the imaging was with a light microscope, the resolution of what was happening wasn’t too good. So you couldn’t really know what was happening just by looking at the images. I’ll probably need to find the article now…
So, the growing cellulose fibers act as a catalyst for the knotting of monolignols. Or at least that’s my current hypothesis. And just because the image of hexagonal cellulose growing out of a hexagonal lattice of monolignols is so cool, I’ll add that here. This time with two hexagonal layers.
This might already be enough for me to start building the manuscript of the structure of plant life. I’ll be sure to keep you updated as I progress.
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