Emerging Trends in Genetic Engineering of Microalgae for Commercial Applications

Abstract

Recently, microalgal biotechnology has received increasing interests in producing valuable, sustainable and environmentally friendly bioproducts. The development of economically viable production processes entails resolving certain limitations of microalgal biotechnology, and fast evolving genetic engineering technologies have emerged as new tools to overcome these limitations. This review provides a synopsis of recent progress, current trends and emerging approaches of genetic engineering of microalgae for commercial applications, including production of pharmaceutical protein, lipid, carotenoids and biohydrogen, etc. Photochemistry improvement in microalgae and CO2 sequestration by microalgae via genetic engineering were also discussed since these subjects are closely entangled with commercial production of the above mentioned products. Although genetic engineering of microalgae is proved to be very effective in boosting performance of production in laboratory conditions, only limited success was achieved to be applicable to industry so far. With genetic engineering technologies advancing rapidly and intensive investigations going on, more bioproducts are expected to be produced by genetically modified microalgae and even much more to be prospected.

Mitochondria and chloroplasts function in microalgae energy production

“…Although there are numerous works where synthetic biology was applied in the design of other microorganisms of biotechnological interest, few work has been done related to the genetic modification of microalgae genomes. One of the main reasons would be that there is still little information of complete microalgae sequenced genomes compared to other microorganisms such as bacteria ( Grama, Liu & Li, 2022 ; Kumar et al, 2020 ). However, in the last few years, several techniques have been developed that allowed the modification and editing of these genomes, however, the genetic engineering of algae was proved to be effective improving performance under laboratory conditions, but with limited success in industry.…”

“…As we mentioned above, microalgae are microorganisms of high interest due to their ability to produce clean energy. In addition, there are numerous reports which described the use of these microorganisms for the production of different bio-products of biotechnological interest due to their metabolic diversity ( Grama, Liu & Li, 2022 ; Kumar et al, 2020 ; Ng et al, 2017 ; Yang et al, 2017 ). In this way, the extensive use of microalgae could mitigate not only the problems related to energy deficiency, but also some of the problems caused by climate change and the feeding of the human population in the coming years.…”

Engineering microalgae as the next-generation food

“…The microalga biomass is used for various purposes, but for their overproduction there are various challenges such as high-cost maintenance, feedback inhibition, and low space availability for pigment droplets accumulation, and its extraction [73]. High production cost is due to low biomass productivity and poorly developed bio-refinery technologies [44,74]. In the case of phycobilins, higher accumulation affects light-harvesting efficiency [75].…”

Microalgae as an Efficient Vehicle for the Production and Targeted Delivery of Therapeutic Glycoproteins against SARS-CoV-2 Variants

“…Microalgae are able to properly impose post-translational modifications such as glycosylation and disulfide bridges on recombinant proteins [69]. Low biocontainment requirements, minimal immunogenic cross-reactive proteins, and no possibility of infection by mammalian viruses are other important advantages of microalgae for the production of medicinal biologics [70,71]. In addition, these microorganisms can efficiently assemble complex, large, multi-subunit proteins in fully functional forms [21].…”