Bead-based assay for spatiotemporal gene expression control in cell-free transcription-translation systems

Cell-free gene expression has applications in synthetic biology, biotechnology and biomedicine. In this technique gene expression regulation plays an important role. Transcription factors do not completely suppress expression while other methods for expression control, for example CRISPR/Cas, often require important biochemical modifications. Here we use an all Escherichia coli-based cell-free expression system and present a bead-based method to instantly start and, at a later stage, completely stop gene expression. Magnetic beads coated with DNA of the gene of interest trigger gene expression. The expression stops if we remove the bead-bound DNA as well as transcribed mRNA by hybridization to bead-bound ssDNA. Our method is a simple way to control expression duration very accurately in time and space.