The emerging age of cell-free synthetic biology

• Published in: FEBS letters Vol. 588; no. 17; pp. 2755 - 2761
• Main Authors: Smith, Mark Thomas, Wilding, Kristen M., Hunt, Jeremy M., Bennett, Anthony M., Bundy, Bradley C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier B.V 25.08.2014
• Subjects: Animals; Cell-free; Cell-free protein synthesis; Cell-free synthetic biology; Cell-Free System; Gene circuits; Humans; Synthetic biology; Synthetic Biology - methods; Cell-free; Synthetic biology; Gene circuits; Cell-free synthetic biology; Cell-free protein synthesis
• ISSN: 0014-5793; 1873-3468
• DOI: 10.1016/j.febslet.2014.05.062

•Discuss key features and benefits of a cell-free approach to synthetic biology.•Emerging advancements of cell-free systems for improving synthetic biology.•Cell-free for pharmaceutics, gene circuits, biocatalysis and unnatural amino acids. The engineering of and mastery over biological parts has catalyzed the emergence of synthetic biology. This field has grown exponentially in the past decade. As increasingly more applications of synthetic biology are pursued, more challenges are encountered, such as delivering genetic material into cells and optimizing genetic circuits in vivo. An in vitro or cell-free approach to synthetic biology simplifies and avoids many of the pitfalls of in vivo synthetic biology. In this review, we describe some of the innate features that make cell-free systems compelling platforms for synthetic biology and discuss emerging improvements of cell-free technologies. We also select and highlight recent and emerging applications of cell-free synthetic biology.