The Cellulose Synthase Superfamily 1

The availability of a nearly complete genome sequence for Arabidopsis has created many novel op-portunities to identify, by computational methods, the genes that encode enzymes, which have been difficult to characterize by conventional means. We have used this approach to identify a large family of genes of unknown function that show sequence similarity to cellulose synthase. Our working hypothesis is that these genes encode enzymes that catalyze the synthesis of non-cellulosic polysaccharides (Cutler and Somerville, 1997).

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