A microfabricated reactor for cell-free protein synthesis

Cell-free protein synthesis is one of the most promising techniques for discovery and production of novel biochemical compounds which are useful for medical and biological applications. MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) technology enables us to fabricate microscale reactor systems for protein synthesis. In this paper, we show that the target protein (polyphenylalanine) can be successfully synthesized in the fabricated reactor according to given mRNA templates (polyuridic acid) as the simplest cell-free protein synthesis system. Since the microfabrication is a suitable method to integrate such reactors in a massively parallel structure, the integrated version of the system can be a powerful tool for drug discovery, preparation of combinatorial peptide libraries, etc.