Optimizing Ethanol Production in Escherichia Coli Using a Hybrid of Particle Swarm Optimization and Artificial Bee Colony

Metabolic engineering for biomass production using microorganisms’ cell has received considerable attention in recent years. This is due to the biomass products being extensively used in the field of food additives, supplements, pharmaceuticals, and polymer materials. In this paper, ethanol production in Escherichia coli (E. coli) is the desired product. Sugarcane and corn are often used to produce ethanol. However, one of the problems to produce adequate amounts of ethanol is that large areas are needed to plant sugarcane and corn. Furthermore, the amount of time for the process of dry milling and wet milling is high, which are 40 to 50 hours and 24 to 48 hours, respectively. The wet laboratory is also having limitation on the production of ethanol in microorganisms because the amount of the ethanol produced is not satisfying. Hence, a lot of metabolic engineering techniques is introduced to enhance the production of ethanol in E. coli, such as gene knockout strategy, but the production is yet to meet the demand. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid algorithm of Particle Swarm Optimization with the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm (PSOABC) to identify the optimal set of gene knockout strategy to improve the ethanol production in E. coli. A list of genes to knockout, production of the desired product, and growth rate are presented in this paper. PSOABC has shown better performance in terms of production, growth rate and accuracy.