A benchmark of optimization solvers for genome-scale metabolic modeling

Genome-scale metabolic modeling is a powerful framework for predicting metabolic phenotypes of any organism with an annotated genome. For two decades, this framework has been used for rational design of microbial cell factories. In the last decade, the range of applications has exploded, and new frontiers have emerged, including the study of the gut microbiome and its health implications, and the role of microbial communities in global ecosystems. However, all the critical steps in this framework, from model construction to simulation, require the use of powerful linear optimization solvers, with the choice often relying on commercial solvers for their well-known computational efficiency. In this work, I benchmark a total of six solvers (two commercial and four open-source) and measure their performance to solve linear and mixed-integer linear problems of increasing complexity. Although commercial solvers are still the fastest, at least two open-source solvers show comparable performance. These results show that genome-scale metabolic modeling does not need to be hindered by commercial licensing schemes and can become a truly open science framework for solving urgent societal challenges.