Chapter9 - Cyanobacterial availability for CRISPR-based genome editing: Current and future challenges

Abstract

Cyanobacterial genetic manipulations are optimistic for producing feedstocks, fuels, valuable chemicals, and a basic understanding of stress-induced responses. Regrettably, the newly available genome manipulation tools for cyanobacteria are far from other organisms despite their significant contributions to humanity. This chapter primarily focused on genome engineering efforts available to date for synthetic biology applications and the recent advances in investigations in the development of genome editing in cyanobacteria. Moreover, in recent years, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) dependent approaches rapidly gained engineering popularity in all life domains. Such techniques permit markerless genome editing, simultaneous manipulation of multiple genes, and transcriptional regulation of genes. However, the cyanobacterial genome manipulations by employing the CRISPR tool are still in infancy and limited to very few reports for its synthetic applications, even though the CRISPR drastically shortened the mutant selection time and the segregation advantages. In this chapter, we highlighted the studies that have implemented CRISPR-based tools for cyanobacteria’s metabolic engineering.