[tomohelix]

I have strong doubt it will work. On paper we are just removing an arbitrary boundary that is the cell membrane/wall and combine trillions of cells together to form a giant cell. So it sounds very reasonable and attractive in engineering terms. But these are biological systems inherently designed/evolved to work in one special condition that is the cytoplasm of the host...

Any engineer would know the kind of troubles that can occur if we remove a critical principle of the original design that was there since the system's inception and is literally hardcoded on an operational/abstract level into the system's functions. Trying to fix that mess is unlikely to yield anything close to the original and requires manipulating techniques and knowledge highly intimate within the system.

And we know barely anything about the intimate and detail operation of the molecular structures inside a cell. We know the broad strokes. But ask any biochemist if they are confident of the entire reaction pathway of any enzymes down to the thermodynamics calculations associated with all conformational changes. Maybe you will find a dozen enzymes that we can describe at this detail.

And to optimize cell free synthesis, we would need to know of tens of thousands more. It is possible, but it isn't something I would expect to see soon unless there are major breakthroughs.

[asdff]

All that matters is that it works and is easier or cheaper than existing cell based techniques. If it does, whats the harm then? This is why people are figuring this out on grant funded work after all, to see if it is in fact cheaper than existing techniques. This is how we have found many optimizations to lab work and other processes through basic research in the past.

[daemonk]

TXTL systems already works. And there are antibodies (not many) that can only be produced cell free.

The problem is really scale.