Research on Gene Editing Technology of Single Cell Microalgae

Abstract

Microalgae, a kind of unicellular photoautotrophs that widely exist in marine and freshwater. Microalgae can accumulate a great deal of metabolites in the process of growth, then they have high-value in bioenergy, food production, health care and animal feed. Although microalgae has great potential of development, its practical application is still slow because of its various biological species, incomplete genetic information research, complex industrial production process and so on. In recent years, due to the rapid development of genomics research, especially the emergence of new gene editing techniques, people can quickly efficiently and fully figure out the genetic and molecular information of microalgae. Therefore, wide attention has been paid to the application of new gene editing technology in microalgae breeding and microalgae fermentation engineering. Based on this, this paper briefly introduces some new gene editing techniques, such as zinc finger nuclease (ZFN), transcription activator-like effector nuclease (TALEN), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, CRISPR-associated system, and summarizes the application progress of the above techniques in microalgae gene editing and engineering.