Authors: Cate Miller, Tyler Free, Brad Bundy
Mentors: Brad Bundy
Insitution: Brigham Young University
Diagnostics are an essential tool in the treatment path for many different types of cancer. They are used to determine the progression of cancer treatment and are critical to increase survival rates. The most common diagnostics are often too expensive or sophisticated to be used on a widespread scale. Using a cell-free protein synthesis system to create a biosensor as a diagnostic can drastically decrease costs, increase convenience, and increase survival rates. We previously engineered low-cost CFPS systems to detect glutamine which would be useful for low-cost biosensing of clinically relevant glutamine concentrations. This work reports our progress in optimizing the CFPS glutamine biosensor for improved performance.