Chemical Structure of Cellulose
Today’s Fiber File is about the building block of a whole class of fibers, cellulose. Cellulose in and of itself is not really a fiber but it is what makes up the cells of plant material. Cotton, hemp, rayon, linen, and your garden outside are made up of cellulose, it is the most common organic compound on the planet.
Cellulose is made up of chains of Glucose, you know, sugar. So you may ask, why doesn’t my t-shirt taste good? The reason your shirt and BVDs are not edible (by humans at least) has to do with the oxygen molecule (that O in the middle of the diagram above) that links the glucose chains together. Because of the way oxygen attaches to the glucose rings, via a β(1→4)-glycosidic bonds, it makes cellulose indigestible. However, cellulose’s fraternal twin starch is also made up of glucose rings connected by oxygen, but it is digestible because the oxygen bonds in a different way the rings, via α(1→4)-glycosidic bonds. It is kind of like having a tight or lose grip on someones hand, a tight grip makes it hard for someone to come along (like a digestive enzyme) and pull you apart, but if you have a lose grip it is easy for Red Rover to smash through the chain.
The characteristics of natural plant fibers depend on the way in which the cellulose chains are aligned in the plants structure. I’ll get more into that when I talk about each fiber. Without giving you all a semester of organic chemistry, that is cellulose in a nutshell.
3 Comments
20 November, 2008 at 5:45 am
What a nice post, Liz! Informative AND you made me LOL. AND I like how the chemical structure looks like stick figures falling down or wrestling!
20 November, 2008 at 5:50 am
This is great! I’m bookmarking it for later, so I can refer to it in future.
11 June, 2009 at 7:24 pm
[...] one, but I want to get a bit closer, if you know what I mean. I posted a while about about the molecular structure of cellulose, this is called the micro-structure, today I want to talk about the [...]