Cyanobacterial genome editing toolboxes: recent advancement and future projections for basic and synthetic biology researches

Abstract Cyanobacteria are ancient photosynthetic prokaryotes and serve as a model organism for studies such as photosynthesis and earth elements cycling. Cyanobacteria also termed microbial cell factories, because of their ability to utilize carbon dioxide, as well as sunlight absorption in one way, act as primary producers of the aquatic ecosystem while on the other way the diazotrophic forms fix atmospheric nitrogen in paddy fields. Moreover, the successful invention of several fuels as well as fine chemicals from cyanobacteria is indicative of the advancement in synthetic cyanobacteriology in one hand while on the other knocking the door of the augmented application shortly. Unfortunately, the limited availability of genetic manipulation tools for either at single-gene level or pathway to the whole genome in cyanobacteria compared to other organisms handicaps the fundamental biology researches as well as further application and advancement in synthetic cyanobacteriology. However, the role of genetic tools in tuning gene expression, genome-wide manipulations, and carbon flux redirections is available in cyanobacteria. Furthermore, recently a noteworthy headway evolving to familiarizing novel and efficient genetic manipulations tools such as riboswitches, promoters, ribosome-binding site engineering, small RNA regulatory tools, genome-scale modeling strategies, and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated nuclease has revolutionized the cyanobacteriology. The present chapter disapprovingly recapitulates the recent advancement on the applications and development as well as technical limitations also for the future projections of the toolboxes for genetic manipulation of cyanobacterial genes/genomes. Besides this, the chapter also briefly discusses the toolkits feasible for large-scale cultivation of cyanobacteria.