Metabolic Rewiring and Cultivation Optimization for Photosynthetic Biofuel Production in Cyanobacteria

• The depletion and use of fossil resources together with global environmental concerns related to CO2 emissions require a transition toward carbon-neutral, sustainable bioenergy. Photosynthetic organisms have great potential as cell factories for directly converting CO2 into a broad range of value-added biochemicals, especially biofuels. Cyanobacteria are particularly attractive as platforms for bio-production, due to relatively fast growth rate, genetic tractability, and low nutrient requirements. Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering pave the way to develop cyanobacteria as green chassis for production of various biofuels, including, e.g., hydrogen, ethanol, butanol, and isoprene. However, engineered cyanobacteria show relatively low productivity compared with model heterotrophic microorganisms. Significant advances of biofuel production using cyanobacterial chassis are expected by implementing recently developed system biology tools as well as optimized cultivation systems with newly developed photobioreactors.

Keyword

biofuel

cyanobacteria

metabolic engineering

microbial consortia

photobioreactor

synthetic biology

system biology

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kap (subject category)