Engineering cyanobacteria for the production of aromatic natural products

Aromatic natural products are important for improving human health and quality of life. Large-scale availability of these compounds from plants is limited by low yield and cumbersome extraction. Building high-performance microbial cell factories to produce aromatic natural products by means of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology is a viable option. In the context of climate change and global resource scarcity, choosing solar-powered and carbon-fixing microbial cyanobacteria instead of chemical heterotrophic microorganisms to produce aromatic compounds might be a more progressive and better solution. In this review, we summarize the principal strategies for improving the production of aromatic natural products in engineered cyanobacteria, including regulation of metabolism, optimization of synthetic pathway, culture process development, and microbial cooperation, highlighting the potential and availability of this microbe as a novel chassis cell.