A Metabolic Pathway Design Method Based on Surrogate-Assisted Fireworks Algorithm

In recent years, synthetic biology has emerged as a transformative field combining biology and information technology principles to forge novel approaches in medicine, agriculture, and the chemical industry. Metabolic pathway design is a critical branch of synthetic biology that enables more efficient and cost-effective production of target compounds. Gibbs free energy is a crucial criterion for assessing the feasibility of a metabolic pathway. Therefore, we propose a metabolic pathway design method named FWAPathDesign, based on a surrogate-assisted Fireworks Algorithm (FWA), which can design efficient metabolic pathways. This paper uses pyruvate and vanillin as target compounds to design metabolic pathways in the experimental part. Throughout the iterative process of the algorithm, FWAPathDesign can not only find the classical metabolic pathways but also design metabolic pathways with lower Gibbs free energy. Our comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of FWAPathDesign and confirm its potential to impact the field of metabolic pathway design significantly.