Synthetic Cell-Based Approaches to Dissect Autonomous Cellular Oscillators: Recent Applications on the Cell Cycle.

Cell-free extracts have proven to be a tremendous tool for studying cell cycle regulation. This chapter reviews recent advances that expand upon this platform by incorporating synthetic cell-like compartments to encapsulate functional cell cycle regulators. These synthetic approaches allow for a programmable reconstitution of self-sustained autonomous oscillators, including that of mitosis, exhibiting a diverse range of biochemical and physical properties. The high throughput and manipulability of this system provide a comprehensive tool to systematically analyze the single-cell dynamics of this autonomous cell-cycle oscillator across broader yet finer-grained parametric, temporal, and spatial scales. We highlight key applications from the past few years and demonstrate how extending the well-established extract-based research with synthetic systems opens new avenues for tackling unexplored questions regarding cell cycle oscillations and their emergent phenomena.