MARTINI Coarse-Grained Model for Crystalline Cellulose Microfibers

Commercial-scale biofuel production requires a deep understanding of the structure and dynamics of its principal target: cellulose. However, an accurate description and modeling of this carbohydrate structure at the mesoscale remains elusive, particularly because of its overwhelming length scale and configurational complexity. We have derived a set of MARTINI coarse-grained force field parameters for the simulation of crystalline cellulose fibers. The model is adapted to reproduce different physicochemical and mechanical properties of native cellulose Iβ. The model is able not only to handle a transition from cellulose Iβ to another cellulose allomorph, cellulose IIII, but also to capture the physical response to temperature and mechanical bending of longer cellulose nanofibers. By developing the MARTINI model of a solid cellulose crystalline fiber from the building blocks of a soluble cellobiose coarse-grained model, we have provided a systematic way to build MARTINI models for other crystalline biopolymers.