Understanding free fatty acid production under diel cycles in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803.

Cyanobacteria are attractive systems for metabolic engineering due to the relative ease of genetic manipulation and their potential of producing a variety of valuable molecules directly from carbon dioxide. Besides the limited understanding of the function and regulation of their genetic components, the scaling up of cyanobacteria strains from the bench to the open environment has also been a challenging aspect to commercialization.

The environmental changes incurred (such as light exposure and temperature variation) significantly influences pathway regulation and productivity of desired molecules. On-going research in our lab focusses on studying Free Fatty Acids (FFA) production in cyanobacteria Synechocystis PCC6803 under varying light conditions. This presentation will focus on our efforts in engineering a FFA producing strain of Synechocystis and the evaluation of its productivity under both continuous light and diel cycles.