Engineering microalgae through chloroplast transformation to produce high-value industrial products

The last few years have seen an ever-increasing interest in the exploitation of microalgae as an alternative platform to produce high-value products such as biofuels, industrial enzymes, therapeutic proteins, including antibodies, hormones, and vaccines. Due to some unique attractive features, engineering of the chloroplast genome provides a promising platform for the production of high-value targets because it allows manipulation of metabolic processes in ways that would be impossible, or at least prohibitively difficult through traditional approaches. Since its initial demonstration in 1988 in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, genetic tools have been developed, which have made it possible to produce high-value molecules in different species. However, the commercial application of microalgae as production platform is hindered by many factors like poor biomass, low product yields, and costly downstream processing methodologies. In this review, we discuss the potential of microalgae to use as an alternative production platform for high-value targets using chloroplast transformation technology.