Concluding Remarks and Future
Perspectives
Harvesting solar energy by the process of photosynthesis is one of the
nature’s noteworthy accomplishments which can be utilized for creating
sustainable and renewable energy sources. Cyanobacteria have emerged as
suitable cell factories in recent years because of their limited
nutritional requirements, phototrophic nature and simple genetic
composition. Due to simplicity in genetic manipulation, it has attracted
the attention of researchers for the photosynthetic production of a wide
variety of carbon neutral fuels and other value-added chemicals from
CO2. Use of synthetic biology tools has simplified
metabolic engineering of cyanobacteria. Synthetic biology provides
insights into toolboxes like promoters, ribosome binding sites,
riboswitches, terminators and CRISPR/Cas tools for the efficient
heterologous expression of gene of interest. Till now researchers have
produced fuel molecules like isoprene, limonene, squalene, alkanes and
butanol by cyanobacteria in good yield by engineering the biosynthetic
pathway of metabolite of interest utilizing tools of synthetic biology.
In forthcoming years there are chances of increasing the research of
cyanobacterial biofuel production. Currently there is scope of designing
scalable photo bioreactors and developing efficient and economic
downstream processes.