A team of scientists from Northwestern University has developed A new cell-free platform that rapidly identifies optimal enzymes for sustainable fuels and materials, reducing the time to produce sustainable biomanufacturing products from months to weeks. The newly developed platform known as in vitro Prototyping and Rapid Optimization of Biosynthetic Enzymes (iPROBE), delivers a quick and powerful design-build-test framework to discover optimal biosynthetic pathways for cellular metabolic engineering. The new method could be utilized in the production of multiple applications such as clean energy, consumer products, etc. The findings open the door to one day moving from production processes reliant on fossil fuels to more sustainable, biosynthetic-based strategies.