How do cells use polysaccharides?

Answer 1

polysaccharides are used in living things for structure and storage. In plants, cellulose give structure to the cell walls, as does chitin in fungi and peptidoglycan in bacteria. All these carbohydrates are polysaccharides. In animals, glycogen ( branched glucose chains) is used as storage of energy and in plants starch performs the same job. Polysaccharides are important to living things because a polysaccharide is just another way to store and hold glucose, which is the only thing that can provide energy to living organisms. It is just another very important alternative to store energy in living things.

Answer 2

All sorts of ways! Cells sometimes find polysaccharides in their environment and use enzymes to break them down into smaller sugars which are a great source of carbon and energy.

Sometimes cells (such as liver and skeletal muscle cells) convert simple sugars into polysaccharides (like glycogen) to make sugars easier to store. Polysaccharides exert less osmotic pressure on a cell, because they don't hydrogen bond with water as much as an equal mass of monosaccharides would.

A really nifty thing is that they sometimes use polysaccharides in receptor proteins embedded in the cell membrane. So not only do cells break down polysaccharides to get energy and build them up to store sugars, they can use polysaccharides as functional parts of cell signalling!

Answer 3

Polysaccharides are there as storage molecules like starch and cellulose, they are insoluble, and can be broken down into monosaccharides which are more usefu to the body