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Reply to: Critical comment on the assumptions leading to 24-chain microfibrils in wood

Nature Plants volume 10, pages 1067–1070 (2024)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 20 May 2024

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replying to P. A. Penttilä and A. Paajanen Nature Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-024-01689-w (2024)

To understand why Model 3 would provide a better fit, we conducted simulations and observed that a semi-disordered shell with a thickness of 4 Å could make critical contributions in the q-range of 0.25–0.30 Å−1 (that is, the first oscillation), also causing the profile shape (0.15–0.25 Å−1) to shift slightly towards the low-q direction (Fig. 3a). Although the q-range of 0.25–0.30 Å−1 contains critical data about shell-layer thickness, it is usually inaccessible in SAXS experiments and thus ignored in the literature. If we use only the major streak data below 0.25 Å−1 for fitting, the two-phase model still gives a core radius of 12.0 Å (n = 15, dry spruce). Our updated analyses are therefore consistent with the values reported in our original paper for dry spruce: a core radius of 11.9 Å (n = 9, by SAXS) and a shell thickness of ~4 Å (by nuclear magnetic resonance + SAXS)6.

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Fig. 1: Three different models for fitting wood SAXS data.
Fig. 2: Three-phase model fitting of wood SAXS data.
Fig. 3: SAXS simulation results.

Data availability

The raw experimental and simulation data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Vaccines for Infectious Diseases, Xiang An Biomedicine Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Molecular Vaccinology and Molecular Diagnostics, National Innovation Platform for Industry-Education Integration in Vaccine Research, School of Public Health, Xiamen University, Xiamen, People’s Republic of China

    Hwan-Ching Tai

  2. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Republic of China

    Cheng-Si Tsao

  3. Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Republic of China

    Jer-Horng Lin

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  1. Hwan-Ching Tai
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  2. Cheng-Si Tsao
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J.-H.L. was involved in the formal analysis. C.-S.T. and H.-C.T. were involved in the formal analysis and writing.

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Correspondence to Hwan-Ching Tai.

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Tai, HC., Tsao, CS. & Lin, JH. Reply to: Critical comment on the assumptions leading to 24-chain microfibrils in wood. Nat. Plants 10, 1067–1070 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-024-01727-7

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