Next Generation Prokaryotic Engineering: The CRISPR-Cas Toolkit

The increasing demand for environmentally friendly production processes of green chemicals and fuels has stimulated research in microbial metabolic engineering. CRISPR-Cas-based tools for genome editing and expression control have enabled fast, easy, and accurate strain development for established production platform organisms, such as Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae . However, the growing interest in alternative production hosts, for which genome editing options are generally limited, requires further developing such engineering tools. In this review, we discuss established and emerging CRISPR-Cas-based tools for genome editing and transcription control of model and non-model prokaryotes, and we analyse the possibilities for further improvement and expansion of these tools for next generation prokaryotic engineering.