We were recently invited to prepare a paper for the journal Methods about using cell-free transcription-translation reactions (TX-TL) to characterize genetic circuits. We immediately joined forces with Vincent Noireaux’s and Richard Murray’s groups and had a lot of fun putting this together! What started out as a brief intro to the basics behind TX-TL turned into quite an impressive collection of basics, tips and tricks, connections to industry, emerging applications and future perspectives about TX-TL. In fact we think this would be a great starting point for those interested in jumping into TX-TL to get their feet wet. We even included a shout out to the CSHL SynBio Summer course in a section on how TX-TL could be an interesting new teaching tool for synthetic biology!
If you don’t have access to Methods, you can see pretty much everything on BioRxiv here.
Lucks Laboratory 