Deciphering and engineering high-light tolerant cyanobacteria for efficient photosynthetic cell factories

Development and utilization of“liquid sunshine”could be one of key solutions to deal with the issues of fossil fuel depletion and increasing carbon dioxide.Cyanobacteria are the only prokaryotes capable of performing oxygenic photosynthesis,and their activity accounts for~25%of the total carbon fixation on earth.More importantly,besides their traditional roles as primary producers,cyanobacteria could be modified as“photosynthetic cell factories”to produce renewable fuels and chemicals directly from CO_(2) driven by solar energy,with the aid of cutting-edging synthetic biology technology.Towards their large-scale biotechnological application in the future,many challenges still need to be properly addressed,among which is cyanobacterial cell factories inevitably suffer from high light(HL)stress during large-scale outdoor cultivation,resulting in photodamage and even cell death,limiting their productivity.In this review,we critically summarized recent progress on deciphering molecular mechanisms to HL and developing HL-tolerant chassis in cyanobacteria,aiming at facilitating construction of HLresistant chassis and promote the future application of the large-scale outdoor cultivation of cyanobacterial cell factories.Finally,the future directions on cyanobacterial chassis engineering were discussed.

Identification of genes involved in cadmium-ion tolerance in evolutionary Synechocystis sp.PCC 6803 tolerant to both cadmium and high light

Photosynthetic cyanobacteria have shown great potential as“autotrophic cell factories”for the synthesis of fuels and chemicals.However,poor tolerance to various environmental stressors such as high light and heavy metals is an important factor limiting their economic viability.While numerous studies have focused on the tolerance mechanism of cyanobacteria to individual stressors,their response to simultaneous stresses remains to be recovered.To investigate the mechanism of cross tolerance to heavymetal Cd^(2+) and high light,the model cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp.PCC 6803 tolerant to both Cd^(2+) and high light was obtained via about 800 days’cross-adaptive laboratory evolution.Three evolutionary strains capable of tolerating both 5.5 μmol·L^(-1) Cd^(2+) and 600 μmol·m^(-2)·s^(-1) high light were successfully obtained,achieving about 83%enhancement of Cd^(2+) tolerance compared with the parent strain.The different response of parent and evolutionary strains to Cd^(2+) was elucidated via metabolomics.Furthermore,a total of 15 genes that were mutated during evolution were identified by whole-genome re-sequencing.Finally,by single-gene knockout and complementation analysis,four genes including ssl2615,sll1732,ssr1480,and sll1659 involved in the improvement of Cd^(2+) tolerance under high-light condition were successfully identified.This work explored the tolerance mechanism of Synechocystis sp.PCC 6803 to cadmium under high-light condition and provided valuable reference for deciphering multitolerance mechanism of cyanobacteria in the future.

Measuring bulk and surface acoustic modes in diamond by angle-resolved Brillouin spectroscopy

The acoustic modes of diamond are not only of profound significance for studying its thermal conductivity, mechanical properties, and optical properties, but also play a definite role in the performance of high-frequency and high-power acoustic wave devices. Here, we report on the bulk acoustic waves(BAWs) and surface acoustic waves(SAWs) of single-crystal diamond using angle-resolved Brillouin light scattering(BLS) spectroscopy. We identify two high-speed surface skimming bulk waves(SSBW) with acoustic velocities of 1.277×10^(6) and 1.727×10^(6) cm/s, respectively. Furthermore, we obtain the relationship between the velocity of arbitrary BAWs and that of BAWs propagating along the high-symmetric axis at different incident angles. In the community of diamond-based acoustic studies, our results may provide a valuable reference for fundamental research and device engineering.