CRISPR driven Cyanobacterial Metabolic Engineering and its role in metabolite production

Abstract

Recently, the advancement in sustainable methods for fabricating novel metabolites is one of the prime challenges in metabolic engineering. The current increase in fuel prices and its limited supply made the scientific community more concerned about finding an alternate source of fuel generation. Scientists are now interested in biofuel because of its low cost and ease of production. An intriguing area of research in metabolic engineering is using imaginative manipulation of microbes to manufacture chemicals or molecules of commercial importance. One such bacterium whose commercial potential is rapidly attracting the attention of the scientific fraternity is Cyanobacteria, which are either single-celled or multi-cellular filamentous photosynthetic organisms that can also fix CO2. The generation of biofuel has been transformed by the use of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology in cyanobacteria, which allows for precise genetic alterations to improve their metabolic processes. Scientists can effectively modify the cyanobacterial genome using CRISPR to increase lipid accumulation, maximize photosynthetic efficiency, and enhance stress tolerance. Cyanobacteria have gained attention in the scientific community as a potential source for biofuel production due to several advantageous characteristics like photosynthetic capacity, genetic manipulation, lack of dependency on fertile land, high biomass yield, versatile biofuel production etc. which our present manuscript aims to catalogue. Cyanobacteria play a pivotal role in developing environmentally friendly energy solutions by converting CO2 into renewable energy sources, serving as a flexible platform for producing different types of biofuels and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.