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.