[Seminar] "Artificial cell reactor technology for digital bioassay, enzyme screening, and system reconstitution" by Prof. Hiroyuki Noji

Speaker: Prof. Hiroyuki Noji, Department of Applied Chemistry, The University of Tokyo

Title: Artificial cell reactor technology for digital bioassay, enzyme screening, and system reconstitution

Abstract:

We developed femto-liter reactor array device (FRAD) that display over million water-in-oil droplets with size of femto-liter range. One can readily encapsulate bio- or non-biological molecules into the FRAD reactors, by spreading assay mixture on the device and sealing the reactors with oil. The extremely small volume features of the reactors on FRAD allows very sensitive bioassay at single-molecule referred as to ‘digital bioassay’. The massive number of the reactor enables to hit highly active but very rare functional molecules among a large numbers of library. The high biocompatibility of FRAD reactors also allows the reconstitution of molecular systems such as cell-free gene expression and replication. In this presentation, I will firstly introduce the concept of FRAD in the context of synthetic biology, and show some applications including enzyme screening for the engineering of alkaline phosphatase to enhance kcat. The last part of the talk includes the implementation of large DNA amplification system and/or cell-free gene expression system in FRAD with the attempt for cell-free DNA assembly and/or cell-free gene cloning systems.

Website: http://www.nojilab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eng/