I am currently working with mRNA display systems and have encountered a few technical questions that I hope you might be able to advise on:
Which system tends to yield higher translation efficiency: rabbit reticulocyte lysate or the NEB PURExpress® kit? I tried some affibodies' constructs from published paper using PURExpress kit, but no protein band was detected by western blotting.
When using a rabbit reticulocyte lysate kit, I observe significant background in the Western blotting of the 15uL translation products. Would you recommend a purification step—such as using Oligo(dT)25—prior to Western blotting to reduce this background?