Genetic and metabolic advances in the engineering of cyanobacteria

Cyanobacteria are a group of photosynthetic microorganisms with high commercial potential. They can utilize sunlight directly to convert carbon dioxide or even nitrogen into a variety of industrially relevant chemicals. However, commercial platforms for the renewable and sustainable production of chemicals have yet to be demonstrated for cyanobacteria. Diverse strategies have therefore been employed in recent years to improve the production yields and efficiency of target chemicals. These include the use of CRISPR/Cas systems for mutant selection, synthetic RNA elements for controlling transcription, metabolic network modelling for understanding pathway fluxes, enzyme engineering, improving growth rates, alleviating product toxicity and microbial consortia. More elaborate strategies for engineering cyanobacteria, however, are still very much required if we are to meet the grand challenge of employing cyanobacteria as photosynthetic workhorses for large-scale industrial applications.