Paavo Penttilä

The FibForm project studies how plants can control the nanostructure of their cell walls, so that they obtain the desired strength and other properties. The idea behind my research is that the specific structure of hemicellulose polymers, a main component of plant cell walls, guides the building of cellulosic fibrillar structures. I plan to confirm this hypothesis by studying different kinds of plants and model systems, in which differences in the hemicelluloses result in different fibril morphologies. By better understanding the relationships between the chemical structure of the hemicelluloses and the resulting properties of the plant cell walls, we can develop plants for more sustainable agriculture.