13Living cells optimize their fitness against constantly changing environments to sur-14 vive. Goal attainment optimization is a mathematical framework to describe the si-15 multaneous optimization of multiple conflicting objectives that must all reach a perfor-16 mance above a threshold or goal. In this study, we applied goal attainment optimization 17 to harness natural modularity of cellular metabolism to design a modular chassis cell for 18 optimal production of a diverse class of products, where each goal corresponds to the 19 minimum biosynthesis requirements (e.g., yields and rates) of a target product. This 20 modular cell design approach enables rapid generation of optimal production strains 21 that can be assembled from a modular cell and various exchangeable production mod-22 ules and hence accelerates the prohibitively slow and costly strain design process. We 23 formulated the modular cell design problem as a blended or goal attainment mixed 24 integer linear program, using mass-balance metabolic models as biological constraints. 25 By applying the modular cell design framework for a genome-scale metabolic model 26 of Escherichia coli, we demonstrated that a library of biochemically diverse products 27 could be effectively synthesized at high yields and rates from a modular (chassis) cell 28 with only a few genetic manipulations. Flux analysis revealed this broad modular-29 ity phenotype is supported by the natural modularity and flexible flux capacity of core 30 metabolic pathways. Overall, we envision the developed modular cell design framework 31 provides a powerful tool for synthetic biology and metabolic engineering applications 32 such as industrial biocatalysis to effectively produce fuels, chemicals, and therapeutics 33 from renewable and sustainable feedstocks, bioremediation, and biosensing. 34 Keywords-Biocatalysis, modular cell, ModCell, modular design, metabolic network mod-35 eling, constraint-based modeling, multi-objective optimization, mixed integer linear programming, 36 goal programming, Benders decomposition. 37 1 Introduction 38Microbial metabolism can be engineered to produce a large space of molecules from renewable 39 and sustainable feedstocks. 1 Currently, only a handful of fuels and chemicals out of the many 40 possible molecules offered by nature are industrially produced by microbial conversion, mainly 41 because the strain engineering process is too laborious and expensive. 2 Thus, innovative technologies 42 enabling rapid and economically-feasible strain engineering are needed to harness a large space of 43 industrially-relevant biochemicals. 1-3 To tackle this challenge, the principles of modular design that 44 have shown great success in traditional engineering disciplines can be adapted to construct modular 45 cell biocatalysts in a plug-and-play fashion with minimal strain optimization cycles. 4
46Multi-objective optimization is a powerful mathematical framework widely applied in engi-47 neering disciplines to tackle the optimal design of a complex system wi...