Microalgae, also called microphytes, are a vast group of microscopic photosynthetic organisms living in aquatic ecosystems. Microalgae have attracted the attention of biotechnology industry as a platform for extracting natural products with high commercial value. During last decades, microalgae have been also used as cost-effective and easily scalable platform for the production of recombinant proteins with medical and industrial applications. Most progress in this field has been made with Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as a model organism mainly because of its simple life cycle, well-established genetics and ease of cultivation. However, due to the scarcity of existing infrastructure for commercial production and processing together with relatively low product yields, no recombinant products from C. reinhardtii have gained approval for commercial production and most of them are still in research and development. In this review, we focus on the chloroplast of C. reinhardtii as an algal recombinant expression platform and compare its advantages and disadvantages to other currently used expression systems. We then discuss the strategies for engineering the chloroplast of C. reinhardtii to produce recombinant cells and present a comprehensive overview of works that have used this platform for the expression of high-value products.

微藻，也称为微植物，是生活在水生生态系统中的大量微观光合生物。微藻作为提取具有高商业价值的天然产物的平台吸引了生物技术产业的关注。在过去的几十年中，微藻还被用作具有成本效益且易于扩展的平台，用于生产具有医学和工业应用的重组蛋白。在该领域中，以莱茵衣藻作为典范生物已经取得了最大的进展，这主要是因为其生命周期简单，遗传学成熟并且易于栽培。但是，由于缺乏用于商业生产和加工的现有基础设施以及相对较低的产品产量，因此没有来自C. reinhardtii已获得商业生产的批准，其中大多数仍在研发中。在这篇综述中，我们专注于作为藻类重组表达平台的莱茵衣藻的叶绿体，并比较其与其他当前使用的表达系统的优缺点。然后，我们讨论了工程改造莱茵衣藻叶绿体以产生重组细胞的策略，并提供了使用该平台表达高价值产品的工作的全面概述。