Towards Biofuel Production in Synechocystis Sp. PCC 6803: Expanding the Molecular Biology Toolbox for Pathway Engineering

Biofuel production in microorganisms has great potential to fulfill this nation’s need for fungible “green” transportation fuels.  Because of the simplicity of bacterial cells, photosynthetic cyanobacteria make good candidates as a platform for biofuel production.   Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 is an attractive production platform due to rapid doubling times, a sequenced genome and an established molecular biology toolbox.  This molecular biology toolbox was established to probe the biology of photosynthesis and has not been optimized for pathway engineering which is necessary for biofuels production.  This presentation will discuss our efforts to develop an alternative counter selection marker and to develop and characterize promoters for gene expression under varying conditions.  The use of these tools to study and optimize free fatty acid production in Synechocystis will also be discussed.