Abstract
Cyanobacteria are serving as promising microbial platforms for development of photosynthetic cell factories. For enhancing the economic competitiveness of the photosynthetic biomanufacturing technology, comprehensive improvements on industrial properties of the cyanobacteria chassis cells and engineered strains are required. Cellular morphology engineering is an up-and-coming strategy for development of microbial cell factories fitting the requirements of industrial application. In this work, we performed systematic evaluation of potential genes for cyanobacterial cellular morphology engineering. Twelve candidate genes participating in cell morphogenesis of an important model cyanobacteria strain, Synechococcus elongatus PCC7942, were knocked out/down and overexpressed, respectively, and the influences on cell sizes and cell shapes were imaged and calculated. Targeting the selected genes with potentials for cellular morphology engineering, the controllable cell lengthening machinery was also explored based on the application of sRNA approaches. The findings in this work not only provided many new targets for cellular morphology engineering in cyanobacteria, but also helped to further understand the cell division process and cell elongation process of Synechococcus elongatus PCC7942.
Highlights
Cyanobacteria emerged as the simplest and the most ancient oxygen-evolving phototrophs, paving the way for evolution of other aerobiont on the planet, and meantime contributing a large portion of the oxygen to the current biosphere environment (Flombaum et al, 2013; Rousseaux and Gregg, 2014)
In addition to the strategy of gene knockout, we explored the effects of overexpressing each of the twelve candidate genes on cellular morphology of PCC7942
Cellular morphology engineering is an up-and-coming strategy to improve complex phenotypes required by industrial application
Summary
Cyanobacteria emerged as the simplest and the most ancient oxygen-evolving phototrophs, paving the way for evolution of other aerobiont on the planet, and meantime contributing a large portion of the oxygen to the current biosphere environment (Flombaum et al, 2013; Rousseaux and Gregg, 2014). By performing high efficient photosynthesis, cyanobacteria capture solar energy and carbon dioxide for production of diverse organic compounds, accounting for up to 20% of the primary production. Through assembling and regulating the native, heterologous, or artificial metabolic pathways in cyanobacteria chassis cells, photosynthetic production of dozens of natural or non-natural metabolites utilizing solar energy and carbon dioxide has been achieved with diverse cyanobacteria cell factories (Desai and Atsumi, 2013). Besides the synthesis capacity of final products, there are some other important traits of the cyanobacteria cell factories influencing the economic competitiveness of the photosynthetic biomanufacturing technology, including the tolerance to environmental stresses, the resistance to biocontaminants, and the convenience for biomass harvesting (Luan and Lu, 2018). To remove the restrictions over practical applications of photosynthetic biomanufacturing, these complex industrial traits of the cyanobacterial cell factories are yet to be significantly improved, which would require comprehensive remodeling of the behaviors and characteristics of the cyanobacteria chassis cells
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