Life as we know it is compartmentalized: a continuous membrane encloses the cytoplasm protecting it from the environment and specifying a unit of evolutionary selection. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The captions for SI Tables and SI Figures have been included at the end of the manuscript.įunding: This work was funded by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research ( VIDI-grant 723.012.007, to CD and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada ( ), grant-PGSD3-404727-2011, to AS. Please note that all SI Tables, SI Figures and SI text have been included in a single file. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information file. Received: JAccepted: SeptemPublished: October 6, 2016Ĭopyright: © 2016 Scott et al. van Veen, University of Cambridge, UNITED KINGDOM Besides clear implications for growth and potentially division of a synthetic cell, we postulate that gene-based lipid biosynthesis can become instrumental for ex vivo and protein purification-free production of natural and non-natural lipids.Ĭitation: Scott A, Noga MJ, de Graaf P, Westerlaken I, Yildirim E, Danelon C (2016) Cell-Free Phospholipid Biosynthesis by Gene-Encoded Enzymes Reconstituted in Liposomes.

Moreover, this study demonstrates that two-step acyl transfer can occur from enzymes synthesized inside vesicles. Acyl-coenzyme A and glycerol-3-phosphate were used as canonical precursors to generate a variety of important bacterial lipids. coli enzymes for acyl transfer and headgroup modifications were produced in a cell-free gene expression system and were co-translationally reconstituted in liposomes. Here, we show that phospholipid biosynthesis, a multiple-step process involved in cell membrane homeostasis, can be reconstituted starting from the genes encoding for all necessary proteins. One major challenge resides in the in vitro production and implementation of complex genetic and metabolic pathways that can support essential cellular functions. The goal of bottom-up synthetic biology culminates in the assembly of an entire cell from separate biological building blocks.

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