Abstract--One of the major drawbacks of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals is the high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted signal. Many PAPR reduction techniques have been proposed in the literature, among which, partial transmit sequence (PTS) technique has been taken considerable investigation. However, PTS technique requires an exhaustive search over all combinations of allowed phase factors, whose complexity increases exponentially with the number of sub-blocks. In this paper, a newly suboptimal method based on modified artificial bee colony (ABC-PTS) algorithm is proposed to search the better combination of phase factors. The ABC-PTS algorithm can significantly reduce the computational complexity for larger PTS subblocks and offers lower PAPR at the same time. Simulation results show that the ABC-PTS algorithm is an efficient method to achieve significant PAPR reduction .