Abstract
Cyanobacteria are attractive hosts that can be engineered for the photosynthetic production of fuels, fine chemicals, and proteins from CO2. Moreover, the responsiveness of these photoautotrophs towards different environmental signals, such as light, CO2, diurnal cycle, and metals make them potential hosts for the development of biosensors. However, engineering these hosts proves to be a challenging and lengthy process. Synthetic biology can make the process of biological engineering more predictable through the use of standardized biological parts that are well characterized and tools to assemble them. While significant progress has been made with model heterotrophic organisms, many of the parts and tools are not portable in cyanobacteria. Therefore, efforts are underway to develop and characterize parts derived from cyanobacteria. In this review, we discuss the reported parts and tools with the objective to develop cyanobacteria as cell factories or biosensors. We also discuss the issues related to characterization, tunability, portability, and the need to develop enabling technologies to engineer this “green” chassis.
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Acknowledgements
Authors acknowledge useful discussions with Sandeep B. Gaudana, Badrish Soni, and Shinjinee Sengupta.
Funding
This work was funded by a research grants provided by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India (Grant No: BT/EB/PAN IIT/2012) to PPW, the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum for Indo-US Advanced Bioenergy Consortium (IUABC) (Grant No: IUSSTF/JCERDC-SGB/IUABC-IITB/2016) to PPW, and HBP and Office of Science, Department of Energy-BER to HBP.
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PPW, HBP, and AS designed the research. AS performed the research. PPW, HBP, and AS wrote the paper.
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Sengupta, A., Pakrasi, H.B. & Wangikar, P.P. Recent advances in synthetic biology of cyanobacteria. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 102, 5457–5471 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-018-9046-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-018-9046-x