The rapidly growing amount of genetic and proteomic information available in the post-genomic era precludes the use of traditional cell-based protein expression systems to screen proteins of interest for their potential as vaccine targets. The development of cell-free based systems, first described in 1960's [26] , allows the high throughput recombinant expression of thousands of proteins in reduced volume and time. The most popular cell-free systems are based in E. coli, wheat germ and rabbit reticulocytes extracts [4, 5, 27] . This platform has been applied in a number of proteomics-based studies including structural and functional proteomics [28, 29, 30] , protein evolution [31] , unnatural amino acids and protein labeling [32, 33] , protein interaction [34] , diagnostics and therapeutics [35, 36] and protein microarrays [15, 37, 38, 39] . The protein microarray platform, exploiting antigen-specific antibodies present in plasma or sera from exposed or immunized animals or humans, has been of particular interest to our laboratory to identify potential target antigens for malaria vaccine development [10, 11, 40] . Although Plasmodium proteins have proven particularly difficult to express using conventional cell-based methods, efficient expression of P. falciparum proteins ($ 93%) has been obtained using the E. coli cell-free system [11] . The wheat germ system has been also used for production of P. falciparum proteins, but with less efficiency (75%) [12] .