Applications of genome-scale metabolic models of microalgae and cyanobacteria in biotechnology

Industrial production of biofuels and platform chemicals in microalgae and cyanobacteria holds great promise since only sunlight, water, and atmospheric carbon dioxide are required. At present it is not economically feasible to use photosynthetic organisms for the production of large-volume, low-cost compounds. If this is to change, product yields must improve significantly. This will most likely require extensive genetic engineering of phototrophs. Genome-scale models of microbial metabolism are increasingly being used in biological discovery and metabolic engineering. This chapter provides an overview of genome-scale metabolic models of cyanobacteria and microalgae and describes their applications in biotechnology, strain design, and analysis of omics data.