Producing Our Own Lysates
Lambert iGEM’s 2024 wet lab experiments relied on commercial TXTL systems from Arbor Biosciences. Despite the convenience of using commercial cell-free kits for gene expression, their high cost makes long-term usage a financial burden.
To circumvent this, Lambert iGEM pursued cell-free lysates – bacterial cell extracts containing the necessary machinery for transcription and translation, allowing for rapid prototyping and testing of genetic circuits without using living cells. While initial reagent costs for producing our own lysates are substantial, successfully creating them would significantly lower our future testing expenses.
We learned extraction procedures from former Lambert iGEM member Sachintha Ashok and received amino acid stocks for lysate testing from the Styczynski Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Our future objectives include successfully testing CRISPRi and toehold switch systems in our custom cell lysates, expanding the applications of Lambert iGEM’s in-house protein synthesis (see Experiments).