https://pages.htgaa.org/2026a/fiona-connolly/homework/week-09-hw-cell-free-systems/index.htmlCell-Free Systems At a glance. Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) is transcription and translation in a tube — the molecular machinery a cell uses to read DNA and make protein, decanted into a defined buffer. Because the reaction is open and tunable from the moment you set it up, CFPS does things a living cell cannot: it expresses host-killing proteins, it incorporates non-canonical amino acids at scale, it can be freeze-dried into ambient-stable point-of-care diagnostics, and it can be encapsulated in lipid vesicles to build synthetic minimal cells from the bottom up. This page is a topic guide to the platform — what it is, when to reach for it, how it fails, and how the field has used it over the past decade to move from a lab curiosity to a clinical and field-deployable technology.Hugoen