Abstract

Cell-free transcription and translation reactions lie at the heart of the rising field known as in vitro synthetic biology and their existence is fundamental for the reconstitution of artificial cells. While researchers are exploring different ways to create such reactions, the common feature that they share is the use of a template DNA to carry the information for the specific function that the reaction is required to perform. The scope of this thesis is to elucidate the relationship between the genotype and the phenotype in such reactions, investigating both transcription and translation using state of the art fluorescence spectroscopy.