Novel cis-regulatory elements as synthetic promoters to drive recombinant protein expression from the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii nuclear genome

•Putative cis-regulatory elements (pCREs) were discovered in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.•Minimal promoters were built using pCRE concatemers linked to a core promoter.•Synthetic promoters drove graded protein expression from the C. reinhardtii nuclear genome.•Two promoters displayed reporter expression levels approaching that of AR1.