Martini 3 Model of Cellulose Microfibrils: On the Route to Capture Large Conformational Changes of Polysaccharides

High resolution data from all-atom molecular simulations is used to parameterize a Martini 3 coarse-grained (CG) model of cellulose I allomorphs and cellulose type-II fibrils. In this case, elementary molecules are represented by four effective beads centred in the positions of O2, O3, C6, and O6 atoms in the D-glucose cellulose subunit. Non-bonded interactions between CG beads are tuned according to a low statistical criterion of structural deviation using the Martini 3 type of interactions and are capable of being indistinguishable for all studied cases. To maintain the crystalline structure of each single cellulose chain in the microfibrils, elastic potentials are employed to retain the ribbon-like structure in each chain. We find that our model is capable of describing different fibril-twist angles associated with each type of cellulose fibril in close agreement with atomistic simulation. Furthermore, our CG model poses a very small deviation from the native-like structure, making it appropriate to capture large conformational changes such as those that occur during the self-assembly process. We expect to provide a computational model suitable for several new applications such as cellulose self-assembly in different aqueous solutions and the thermal treatment of fibrils of great importance in bioindustrial applications.