The ultimate goal of this project was the production and excretion of a lauroyl ester-based drop-in biofuel by building on the development of a cyanobacterial strain derived from <
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sp. PCC 6803 that is efficient in using sunlight to reduce CO<
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from the atmosphere to produce and excrete laurate, a fatty acid (FA) that is easily used as a biofuel precursor. To achieve this goal the project focused on five primary objectives: (1) produce more laurate, (2) convert laurate to a lauroyl ester by introducing additional genetic modifications for the synthesis of fatty acid esters, (3) arrest cell growth but not metabolic activity, to make resources more available for lauroyl ester production, (4) reduce the native production of exopolysaccharides to increase the amount of fixed carbon available for biofuel production and to reduce the carbon nutrients available in the medium for potential invasive microbes, and (5) perform a techno-economic analysis to evaluate the longer-term promise and viability of lauroyl ester production in cyanobacterial systems. A photosynthetically produced lauroyl ester could be used as a diesel replacement without the need for additional and costly downstream processing steps, a development of great importance to the mission of DOE with regard to biofuel production.