Metabolic engineering tools in model cyanobacteria

Developing sustainable routes for producing chemicals and fuels is one of the most important challenges in metabolic engineering. Photoautotrophic hosts are particularly attractive because of their potential to utilize light as an energy source and CO2 as a carbon substrate through photosynthesis. C...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Metabolic engineering 2018-11, Vol.50, p.47-56
Main Authors: Carroll, Austin L., Case, Anna E., Zhang, Angela, Atsumi, Shota
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Carbon Dioxide - metabolism
CRISPR-Cas Systems
Cyanobacteria - genetics
Cyanobacteria - metabolism
Escherichia coli - genetics
Escherichia coli - metabolism
Metabolic Engineering - methods
Photosynthesis - physiology
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Summary:Developing sustainable routes for producing chemicals and fuels is one of the most important challenges in metabolic engineering. Photoautotrophic hosts are particularly attractive because of their potential to utilize light as an energy source and CO2 as a carbon substrate through photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria are unicellular organisms capable of photosynthesis and CO2 fixation. While engineering in heterotrophs, such as Escherichia coli, has result in a plethora of tools for strain development and hosts capable of producing valuable chemicals efficiently, these techniques are not always directly transferable to cyanobacteria. However, recent efforts have led to an increase in the scope and scale of chemicals that cyanobacteria can produce. Adaptations of important metabolic engineering tools have also been optimized to function in photoautotrophic hosts, which include Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9, 13C Metabolic Flux Analysis (MFA), and Genome-Scale Modeling (GSM). This review explores innovations in cyanobacterial metabolic engineering, and highlights how photoautotrophic metabolism has shaped their development. •Developments in cyanobacterial engineering for chemical production are detailed.•We highlight new strain-specific synthetic biology methods.•The adaptation of new metabolic engineering tools for use in cyanobacteria.•Recent findings from omics analysis are summarized.
ISSN:1096-7176
1096-7184
DOI:10.1016/j.ymben.2018.03.014