Hoog, T. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2026

A Chemically Defined Synthetic Cell Capable Of Growth And Replication

Cells are the fundamental unit of life. Yet there is no natural cell for which all its life-essential functions are understood. Here we demonstrate a complete cell cycle for a synthetic cell undergoing selection, with genome replication, growth, resource acquisition via feeding, and genetically encoded division. The cell is encoded via a 90kb genome that includes functions needed for resource uptake, transcription, translation, growth, genome replication, and division. The resulting synthetic cell is sufficiently encouraging to support routinization of synthetic cell engineering workflows, and will ultimately underlie diverse applications across all of biotechnology.

synthetic biology↗

bioRxiv2024

Quencher-free fluorescence monitoring of G-Quadruplex folding

Guanine-rich sequences exhibit a high degree of polymorphism and can form single-stranded, Watson-Crick duplex, and four-stranded G-quadruplex structures. These sequences have found a wide range of uses in synthetic biology applications, arising in part from their structural plasticity. High-throughput, low-cost tools for monitoring the folding and unfolding transitions of G-rich sequences would provide an enabling technology for accelerating prototyping of synthetic biological systems and for accelerating design-build-test cycles. Here, we show that unfolding transitions of a range of G-quadruplex-forming DNA sequences can be monitored in a FRET-like format using DNA sequences that possess only a single dye label, with no quencher. These quencher-free assays can be performed at low cost, with both cost and lead times ca. 1 order of magnitude lower than FRET-labeled strands. Thus, quencher-free secondary structure monitoring promises to be a valuable tool for testing and development of synthetic biology systems employing G-quadruplexes.

biophysics↗