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. 2019 Mar 14;9:4466. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-41084-6

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© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Hypothetical model for the biosynthesis of cellulose in Acanthamoeba cyst. Glycogen in the cytoplasm is degraded by catalytic action of glycogen phosphorylase, releasing glucose-1-phosphate. Subsequently, UDP (uridine diphosphate) glucose is synthesised from glucose-1-phosphate and UTP (uridine triphosphate) catalysed by UDP-glucose pyrophosphorylase. Through the action of cellulose synthase the glucose residues are polymerized into individual glucan chains that are translocated across the cytoplasmic membrane. The interaction of the cellulose synthase with microtubules is strongly supposed. Glucan chains are likely assembled into elementary fibrils that are associated into microfibrils. This process is called crystallisation. For simplicity, the number of glucan chains is schematic.