CRISPR-Based Metabolic Engineering of Microbial Cell Factories for Sustainable Bio manufacturing: A Systematic analysis of 1,000 Studies (2012–2026)

Abstract CRISPR genome editing and microbial metabolic engineering now work hand in hand. That pairing has changed sustainable bio manufacturing in real ways. This review pulls together 1,000 peer-reviewed articles from 2012 to 2026. They come from 201 journals. We mapped how the field evolved, how the technology diversified, which host chassis researchers prefer, what product classes they target, and where in the world the work gets done. Our approach mixed bibliometric, feature engineering, and multivariate statistics. That includes principal component analysis, hierarchical clustering, co-occurrence network analysis, and correlation mapping. We tracked the CRISPR variant landscape, host chassis distribution, product class priorities, and geographic concentration of research output. The temporal analysis shows a shift. Early work explored many CRISPR variants. Recent work focuses on applications. Mean CRISPR variants per article dropped from 2.42 in 2018 to 1.40 in 2026. Our findings give a quantitative roadmap of where the field is heading. They also point to emerging opportunities in non-conventional yeast, filamentous fungi, and cyanobacterial chassis for sustainable bio manufacturing.