PUREdrop Platform Automates Synthetic Cells to Screen Designed Proteins
bravo_abad · x · 2026-08-17
Kareem Al Nahas and coauthors introduce PUREdrop, an automated microfluidic platform that expresses computationally designed proteins inside thousands of picoliter-sized synthetic cells and follows them via time-lapse microscopy.
- Context: While protein design advances, screening becomes difficult when the target is emergent spatiotemporal behavior rather than binding or catalytic activity.
- Computational Design: The process starts with the bacterial protein FtsZ. Residues involved in GTP binding, polymerization, and evolutionary conservation are protected, while ProteinMPNN redesigns the rest. AlphaFold2 predictions are used to select 24 variants.
- Automated Testing: PUREdrop takes DNA constructs from well plates to express and observe proteins within synthetic cells, addressing the bottleneck of high-throughput functional screening.
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