Abstract: Microalgae cell factories will provide the sustainable solutions for carbon neutrality. In response to some bottleneck issues in the production of high value-added products, environmental remediation, and biofuel synthesis in microalgae cell factories, it is necessary to construct microalgae strains that can grow rapidly, have strong environmental tolerance, and have high content of the target products. The current review systemically introduced the applications of adaptive laboratory evolution, random mutagenesis, genome shuffling, genetic engineering, and genome editing in the construction of microalgae cell factories. Adaptive evolution, mutagenesis, and genome shuffling can obtain the mutants without genetic background. It is possible to make rational construction of microalgae cell factories with the development of synthetic biology technologies such as genome editing. This review analyzed the main problems in the construction of microalgae cell factories and made prospects.

Key words: microalgae, mutagenesis, genome shuffling, adaptive laboratory evolution, genome editing