The cyanobacterium was originally isolated by students of an algology course taught by Kenneth W. Floyd at California State University, San Francisco [Golden19]. A sample containing the isolated strain was given to Sergey V. Shestakov of Moscow State University, who was studying transformation in cyanobacteria [Shestakov70] in 1973. Galina Grigorieva, a student in the Shestakov lab, published the first paper about the organism, which she named Anacystis nidulans R2 [Grigorieva76].

The organism was deposited with the Pasteur Culture Collection (PCC) in 1979, and as it was the 42nd accession of 1979, it received the PCC 7942 suffix. In 1980 it became the first cyanobacterial strain to be reliably transformed by exogenously added DNA, laying the foundation for recombinant DNA-based molecular genetics research in cyanobacteria [vandenHondel80].

The second edition of Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology, published in 2001, introduced the Synechococcus clade and proposed the species Synechococcus elongatus, resulting in changing the organism's name to Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942.

Much of the research conducted with Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 has focused on photosynthesis, circadian clock systems [Cohen15], and nitrogen metabolism. More recently the organism has been used for metabolic engineering [Kanno17, Vayenos20]

We have refined this PGDB by manual curation of data from over 600 research papers, integrating knowledge contributed by many researchers from different fields. Information curated includes metabolic enzymes and pathways as well as several signal-transduction pathways.