Engineering artificial photosynthetic life-forms through endosymbiosis

Here, we design and engineer artificial, genetically tractable, photosynthetic endosymbiosis between photosynthetic cyanobacteria and budding yeasts. We engineer various mutants of model photosynthetic cyanobacteria as endosymbionts within yeast cells where, the engineered cyanobacteria perform bioenergetic functions to support the growth of yeast cells under defined photosynthetic conditions.

They are trying to create a model of hypothetical evolutionary process of absorbing cyanobacteria and turning it into a chroloplast.