Evolutionary programming as a platform for <Emphasis Type="Italic">in silico</Emphasis> metabolic engineering

Background  

Through genetic engineering it is possible to introduce targeted genetic changes and hereby engineer the metabolism of microbial cells with the objective to obtain desirable phenotypes. However, owing to the complexity of metabolic networks, both in terms of structure and regulation, it is often difficult to predict the effects of genetic modifications on the resulting phenotype. Recently genome-scale metabolic models have been compiled for several different microorganisms where structural and stoichiometric complexity is inherently accounted for. New algorithms are being developed by using genome-scale metabolic models that enable identification of gene knockout strategies for obtaining improved phenotypes. However, the problem of finding optimal gene deletion strategy is combinatorial and consequently the computational time increases exponentially with the size of the problem, and it is therefore interesting to develop new faster algorithms.