Codon optimization: A mathematical programing approach

Abstract

Motivation: Synthesizing proteins in heterologous hosts is an important tool in biotechnology. However, the genetic code is degenerate and the codon usage is biased in many organisms. Synonymous codon changes that are customized for each host organism may have a significant effect on the level of protein expression. This effect can be measured by using metrics, such as codon adaptation index, codon pair bias, relative codon bias and relative codon pair bias. Codon optimization is designing codons that improve one or more of these objectives. Currently available algorithms and software solutions either rely on heuristics without providing optimality guarantees or are very rigid in modeling different objective functions and restrictions. Results: We develop an effective mixed integer linear programing (MILP) formulation, which considers multiple objectives. Our numerical study shows that this formulation can be effectively used to generate (Pareto) optimal codon designs even for very long amino acid sequences using a standard commercial solver. We also show that one can obtain designs in the efficient frontier in reasonable solution times and incorporate other complex objectives, such as mRNA secondary structures in codon design using MILP formulations.