Nature publishes new findings by Cheemeng Tan’s lab

Branco Weiss Fellow Cheemeng Tan’s biomedical engineering laboratory at UC Davis has developed a new technique that allows the rapid assembly of pure protein synthesis machinery outside of living cells.

The high-throughput study of cellular pathways and cell-free diagnostic tests for various diseases needs rapid yet high purity reconstitution of cellular reactions outside of biological systems. But the separate expression and purification of each protein required is an expensive and time-consuming process. And to produce more than several proteins at once is extremely challenging.

Nature Chemical Biology just recently published a paper authored by researchers from Dr. Tan’s lab. The paper describes how the scientists, using the new technique, were able to produce all 34 proteins required to study mRNA translation in one single procedure.

“I believe the work will open doors to fundamental improvement in the protein yield of pure cell-free transcription-translation systems and throughput of studying disease-relevant pathways outside of living cells”, Cheemeng Tan is quoted on the UC Davis website.

Read the Nature paper