Bulk Cell-Free Expression Reactions with Small Unilamellar Vesicles (SUVs) for Synthetic Cell Applications

To begin, blow a gentle stream of Argonne into a glass vial containing POPC lipids while gently rotating the vial. When the lipids have dried as a film at the bottom of the vial, loosely cap it, then transfer it to a desiccater. After one hour add 0.5 milliliters of ultrapure deionized water to dissolve the lipid film.

Vortex the solution for two minutes. Next, soak two filter supports and deionized water. Place them on each of the internal membrane supports.

Then place a 100 nanometer polycarbonate filter between the two internal membrane supports, held together by the extruder outer casing and retainer nut. Place the setup in the extruder stand to finish setting up the mini extrusion apparatus. Next, load the lipid water mix into a one milliliter gast tight syringe.

Use swing arm clips to secure the syringe into one end of the mini extruder. Insert the second syringe into the other end of the mini extruder, making sure that it is fully depressed. Now pass the lipid water mix from the original syringe into the empty one through the apparatus.

After repeating the extrusion 11 times, transfer the SUVs to a 1.5 milliliter micro centrifuge tube. To assemble the cell-free expression protocol, pipette solutions one to 3 DNA plasmid encoding for soluble SFGFP or variants of glutamate receptor SFGFP, murine RNAse, and SUV solution into a vial. Add ultrapure deionized water to bring the reaction volume to 20 microliters.

Transfer the cell-free expression solution to a 96 well conical V bottom plate. Incubate the plate in a plate reader at 37 degrees Celsius for four to five hours. Set up the plate reader with a gain of 100, excitation of 485 nanometers, emission of 528 nanometers, a runtime of five hours, and an interval measurement of one read for every two minutes.

Measure the GFP signal every two minutes to monitor the cell-free reaction in real time. Soluble SFGFP had the highest expression among all three proteins.