Establishing Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as an industrial chassis for the production of high value biochemicals

绿藻衣藻是研究藻类、植物和纤毛生物学领域的宝贵参考生物(1)。过多的遗传和分子技术可用于其操作，这意味着它现在处于成为与大肠杆菌或酵母一样的光自养工业生物技术(IB)平台的边缘(2)。然而，转基因表达和有针对性的核基因编辑的长期低效一直是充分利用这一潜力的障碍。最近的技术进步，包括我们使用CRISPR的开创性工作(3)，使莱茵梭菌能够高效、有针对性地进行核苷酸精确的基因修饰。这些转化技术的进展使莱茵梭菌能够第一次作为IB的光自养菌株进行快速工程。有效代谢工程的剩余限制包括转基因沉默和不稳定。然而，基因编辑现在允许我们通过快速菌株工程来克服这些限制。该项目旨在通过与我们的工业合作伙伴ScotBio(www.scotBio.com)密切合作，通过广泛的基因编辑工作，将C.reinhardtii开发为工业底盘。

The green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is an invaluable reference organism to research fields including algal, plant and ciliary biology (1). The plethora of genetic and molecular techniques available for its manipulation means it is now at the cusp of becoming a photoautotrophic industrial biotechnology (IB) platform on par with Escherichia coli or yeast (2). However, long-standing inefficiencies in transgene expression and targeted nuclear gene editing have been remaining hurdles to this potential being fully exploited. Recent technological advances including our seminal work using CRISPR (3) enabled efficient, targeted gene modifications with nucleotide precision in C. reinhardtii. These transformational advances now enable, for the first time, rapid engineering of C. reinhardtii as photoautotrophic strains for IB. Remaining limitations for effective metabolic engineering include transgene silencing and instability. However, gene editing now allows us to overcome these limitations via rapid strain engineering. This project aims to develop C. reinhardtii as an industrial chassis through extensive gene editing efforts in close collaboration with our industrial partner, ScotBio (www.scotbio.com).