Public Lecture: Synthetic Biology and Energy from the Sun: Future is Bright for Food, Feed and Fuels

Oxygenic photosynthesis is a carbon negative clean energy production process of ancient origin. Photosynthetic microorganisms, and especially cyanobacteria, hold great promise as cell factories for renewable production of fuels, bulk and specialty chemicals, as well as nutritional products.

In his presentation, he plans to highlight unique challenges and opportunities for the use of cyanobacteria as microbial cell factories. He shall discuss classical and recently developed methods for constructing targeted mutants in various cyanobacterial and algal strains, and offer perspective on what genetic tools might most greatly expand the ability to engineer new functions in such strains. During recent years, we have described novel photosynthetic organisms that remarkably grow as fast as yeast, while using only light and CO2 as the principal feedstocks. The potentials of such fast growing organisms as autotrophic cell factories will be discussed.