TY - JOUR T1 - Development of prokaryotic cell-free systems for synthetic biology JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/048710 SP - 048710 AU - Abel C. Chiao AU - Richard M. Murray AU - Zachary Z Sun Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/15/048710.abstract N2 - Prokaryotic cell-free systems are currently heavily used for the production of protein that can be otherwise challenging to produce in cells. However, historically cell-free systems were used to explore natural phenomena before the advent of genetic modification and transformation technology. Recently, synthetic biology has seen a resurgence of this historical use of cell-free systems as a prototyping tool of synthetic and natural genetic circuits. For these cell-free systems to be effective prototyping tools, an understanding of cell-free system mechanics must be established that is not purely protein-expression driven. Here we discuss the development of E. coli-based cell-free systems, with an emphasis on documenting published extract and energy preparation methods into a uniform format. We also discuss additional considerations when applying cell-free systems to synthetic biology. ER -