Cell-free synthetic biology: an emerging strategy torevolutionize the biomedical industry / 生物工程学报

Cell-free synthetic biology system can perform biological transcription and translation process in vitro. Because of its advanced features, such as flexible openness, easy control, short expression time and high tolerance to cytotoxicity, this systemhas been successfully used to synthesize proteins that are difficult to express in cells. With the continuous development of cell-free biosensing technology and the lyophilization technology, its applications have widely expanded into many biomedical fields. This review discusses the current research progress of cell-free synthetic biology system in on-demand biopharmaceutical synthesis, portable diagnostics, and others. Further development of the system can lead to even more complicated synthesis of therapeutic proteins with post-translational modifications and evolution of different cell-free biosensors with high sensitivity. Cell-free synthetic biology as an emerging engineering strategy can be a better means applied to high-throughput screening of pharmaceutical proteins, detection of new pathogens, and other important health-care fields in the future.

Recent advances in cell-free unnatural protein synthesis / 生物工程学报

Cell-free unnatural protein synthesis (CFUPS) as an emerging approach for protein engineering research, has been successfully applied in basic scientific studies (e.g., protein-protein interaction, protein-nucleic acid interaction) and industrial production (e.g., pharmaceutical proteins, protein materials). CFUPS can improve the engineering freedom and the process control by allowing free addition of genetic elements and chemicals as research purposes. It also can give protein novel characteristics, structures and functions, including post-translational modification of proteins, incorporation of reaction handles, synthesis of biophysical probes and polymeric protein. This article systematically reviews the unnatural amino acid incorporation methods (global suppression, stop codon suppression, frameshift suppression and unnatural base-pairs) and the application advances of unnatural amino acids in protein modifications, biophysical probes, enzyme engineering, biomaterials and biopharmaceutical protein production. The opportunities and challenges of the CFUPS system development and the wide application of industrialization are also illustrated with details.