This study investigates acetate production for three new engineered variants of Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. One variant had phosphoketolase introduced and acetetyl-coenzyme synthetase knocked out, while the other two variants had a different pyruvate dehydrogenase introduced – each with 2-hydroxyacid dehydrogenase knocked out. The phosphoketolase variant showed a prominent increase in acetate production with 298.92 µg/ml (stdev 29.12 µg/ml) acetate produced over 10 days compared to the wildtype that produced 18.01 µg/ml (stdev 5.42 µg/ml) in the same time span. Another positive trait of the new phosphoketolase variant was that there was no decrease in growth rate despite the genetical modifications.