Its ability to grow rapidly using sunlight has implications for biotechnological applications, especially when incorporating genetic modification.

In 2015, Jingjie Yu and colleagues, were able to isolate the mutant strain from a mixed culture of Synechococcus UTEX 625.

It typically contains 2–3 thylakoid membrane layers forming evenly spaced concentric rings and its carboxysomes and polyphosphate bodies are located in the central cytoplasmic region (Image 1).

[1] Synechococcus elongatus UTEX 2973 is photoautotrophic and has one of the shortest doubling times reported for cyanobacteria at 1.5 hours in a BG11 medium at 42 °C under continuous 1,500 μmoles photons·m−2·s−1 white light with 5% CO2.

[4] Ungerer and colleagues, 2018, used CRISPR/Cpf1, to perform a mutational analysis of S. elongatus UTEX 2973 by identifying the three genes with SNPs associated with rapid growth, atpA, ppnK, and rpaA.