Current anthropogenic CO2 emissions have reached record levels while the demand for energy, food, and materials continues to climb. Fortunately, our planet receives from the sun more energy than is needed to support all human activities. Photosynthetic organisms like cyanobacteria and plants can efficiently capture solar energy to convert inorganic carbon into organic molecules. However, synthetic biology approaches in photoautotrophs remain underdeveloped. This talk explores different strategies to improve carbon fixation, growth, and yield in these organisms. The first strategy uses barcoded CRISPRi libraries coupled with growth-coupled screening to identify genes whose repression enhances growth. The second approach uses mass spectrometry techniques to identify novel protein-protein (BioID) and protein-metabolite (PISA and Lip-Smap) interactions, providing insights into metabolic regulation and serving as potential targets for mutagenesis to create unregulated variants. A third strategy uses generative AI to design new enzyme variants with improved properties. These resulting proteins are then screened in vivo in a cyanobacteria platform for enhanced growth, and the optimized genes are subsequently transferred to bioproducing strains or plants to boost productivity. This combination of systems biology, mutagenesis, and metabolic engineering approaches holds promise for engineering novel metabolic modules for increased growth, and these results could have broad impacts on bioproduction, from chemical manufacturing to agricultural yields.