Abstract
The development of a system capable of synthesizing and characterizing any desired protein on a preparative scale is one of the most important endeavors in biotechnology today. Recently we prepared a cell-free system from extensively washed embryos, and indeed found that the system became far more active. More recently, we are successful to develop a novel cell-free system for the high-throughput (HT) synthesis and screening of gene products by optimizing the mRNA UTRs and a new strategy to construct PCR-generated DNAs. Examples for the assessment of protein folding by NMR and measurement of set of kinase activities provided to show that the system is capable of producing functional proteins. Furthermore, the system made us possible to invent a robotic system, GenDecoder, for HT protein production automatically. The cell-free technology, reported here, has a potential basis for functional proteomics.
