Celluloses

Cellulose is a structural polysaccharide made of thousands of glucose units. Unlike starch or glycogen, cellulose's glucose units are in the beta-glucose form, and successive units are linked by beta-1,4-glycosidic bonds; this specific linkage geometry forces the chain to lie straight and uncoiled rather than to coil into a helix, and it allows many parallel chains to hydrogen-bond side by side into strong, rigid microfibrils - the basis of plant cell wall strength. Cellulose is one of the most abundant organic compounds in the entire biosphere, and it has many industrial applications: raw cellulose fibres are used as cotton, chemically modified cellulose gives nitrocellulose (used in explosives) and cellulose acetate (used in various synthetic fibres), and cellophane (used for packaging) is also cellulose-derived. Most herbivorous animals face a problem: although the plant material they eat is mostly cellulose, animal cells cannot themselves produce the enzyme cellulase needed to break the beta …