Andreas K. Brödel

Protein expression systems are widely used in biotechnology and medicine for the efficient and economic production of therapeutic proteins. Today, cultivated Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are the market dominating mammalian cell-line for the production of complex therapeutic proteins. Despite this outstanding potential of CHO cells, no high-yield cell-free system based on translationally active lysates from these cells has been reported so far. To date, CHO cell extracts have only been used as a foundational research tool for understanding mRNA translation (Lodish et al., 1974; McDowell et al., 1972). In the present study, we address this fact by establishing a novel cell-free protein expression system based on extracts from cultured CHO cells. Lysate preparation, adaptation of in vitro reaction conditions and the construction of particular expression vectors are considered for high-yield protein production. A specific in vitro expression vector, which includes an internal ribosome entry site (IRES) from the intergenic region (IGR) of the Cricket paralysis virus (CrPV), has been constructed in order to obtain optimal performance. The IGR IRES is supposed to bind directly to the eukaryotic 40S ribosomal subunit thereby bypassing the process of translation initiation, which is often a major bottleneck in cell-free systems. The combination of expression vector and optimized CHO cell extracts enables the production of approximately 50 µg/mL active firefly luciferase within 4 h. The batch-type cell-free coupled transcription-translation system has the potential to perform post-translational modifications, as shown by the glycosylation of erythropoietin. Accordingly, the system contains translocationally active endogenous microsomes, enabling the co-translational incorporation of membrane proteins into biological membranes. Hence, the presented in vitro translation system is a powerful tool for the fast and convenient optimization of expression constructs, the specific labeling of integral membrane proteins and the cell-free production of posttranslationally modified proteins.

Abstract Microbiome research is now demonstrating a growing number of bacterial strains and genes that affect our health 1 . Although CRISPR-derived tools have shown great success in editing disease-driving genes in human cells 2 , we currently lack the tools to achieve comparable success for bacterial targets in situ. Here we engineer a phage-derived particle to deliver a base editor and modify Escherichia coli colonizing the mouse gut. Editing of a β-lactamase gene in a model E. coli strain resulted in a median editing efficiency of 93% of the target bacterial population with a single dose. Edited bacteria were stably maintained in the mouse gut for at least 42 days following treatment. This was achieved using a non-replicative DNA vector, preventing maintenance and dissemination of the payload. We then leveraged this approach to edit several genes of therapeutic relevance in E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae strains in vitro and demonstrate in situ editing of a gene involved in the production of curli in a pathogenic E. coli strain. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of modifying bacteria directly in the gut, offering a new avenue to investigate the function of bacterial genes and opening the door to the design of new microbiome-targeted therapies.

Internal ribosome entry site (IRES) elements found in the 59 untranslated region of mRNAs enable translation initiation in a cap-independent manner, thereby representing an alternative to cap-dependent translation in cell-free protein expression systems. However, IRES function is largely species-dependent so their utility in cell-free systems from different species is rather limited. A promising approach to overcome these limitations would be the use of IRESs that are able to recruit components of the translation initiation apparatus from diverse origins. Here, we present a solution to this technical problem and describe the ability of a number of viral IRESs to direct efficient protein expression in different eukaryotic cellfree expression systems. The IRES from the intergenic region (IGR) of the Cricket paralysis virus (CrPV) genome was shown to function efficiently in four different cell-free systems based on lysates derived from cultured Sf21, CHO and K562 cells as well as wheat germ. Our results suggest that the CrPV IGR IRES-based expression vector is universally applicable for a broad range of eukaryotic cell lysates. Sf21, CHO and K562 cell-free expression systems are particularly promising platforms for the production of glycoproteins and membrane proteins since they contain endogenous microsomes that facilitate the incorporation of membrane-spanning proteins and the formation of post-translational modifications. We demonstrate the use of the CrPV IGR IRES-based expression vector for the enhanced synthesis of various target proteins including the glycoprotein erythropoietin and the membrane proteins heparin-binding EGF-like growth factor receptor as well as epidermal growth factor receptor in the above mentioned eukaryotic cell-free systems. CrPV IGR IRES-mediated translation will facilitate the development of novel eukaryotic cell-free expression platforms as well as the high-yield synthesis of desired proteins in already established systems.

Synthetic biology has seen an explosive growth in the capability of engineering artificial gene circuits from transcription factors (TFs), particularly in bacteria. However, most artificial networks still employ the same core set of TFs (for example LacI, TetR and cI). The TFs mostly function via repression and it is difficult to integrate multiple inputs in promoter logic. Here we present to our knowledge the first set of dual activator-repressor switches for orthogonal logic gates, based on bacteriophage λ cI variants and multi-input promoter architectures. Our toolkit contains 12 TFs, flexibly operating as activators, repressors, dual activator-repressors or dual repressor-repressors, on up to 270 synthetic promoters. To engineer non cross-reacting cI variants, we design a new M13 phagemid-based system for the directed evolution of biomolecules. Because cI is used in so many synthetic biology projects, the new set of variants will easily slot into the existing projects of other groups, greatly expanding current engineering capacities.