posted 7 years ago
"So my question is since this applies to cells in man and beast, could this also apply to plant cells and has anyone studied?"
In a nutshell, yes. In fact the carbohydrate biology of plant cell walls has been fairly rigorously studied as bacteria, fungi, and plants are all considered to have complex carbohydrate or glycoprotein "cell wall", a structure not found in animals if I recall correctly. Animals have a cell membrane that is surrounded by a glycoprotein matrix, but this is not the same, structurally, as the cell wall. As noted below in a 2017 review, this level of interaction/communication within an organism in which extracellular complex carbohydrates are involved, has been studied in depth in only a few areas and a great deal awaits to be learned. At the very least they are crucial in many cases for receptor specificity (think of hormones needing to find a specific target receptor for proper activation) but many other cases, I think in the immune system, are also known. Since the focus in plants has been on their cell wall as a structural matrix, much of the knowledge about the finer points of glycan function outside of that role are still being investigated.
Glycans.JPG
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