Improving hydrocarbon production by engineering cyanobacterial acyl-(acyl carrier protein) reductase.

We successfully designed AAR mutants that, when coexpressed with ADO in E. coli, are more highly effective in hydrocarbon production, especially for pentadecane, than wild-type AARs. Our results provide a series of highly productive AARs with different substrate specificities, enabling the production of a variety of hydrocarbons in E. coli that may be used as biofuels.