Overview

In nature, organisms’ genes are robust to the point that the organism persistently reproduces under different external and internal conditions. Synthetic robustness within the field of synthetic biology is a hurdle yet to be crossed. Taguchi method is introduced to reduce variation in gene circuits through robust design of experiment. Three promoters combined with three ribosomal binding sites and three terminators are combined in a series of 27 different circuits each consisting of a promoter followed by an RBS followed by GFP and finished with a terminator. Taguchi method uses orthogonal arrays to organize the parameters and tests for pairs of combinations of factors to gather data with minimum experiments in order to reduce cost and time. The particular gene of interest is GFP, thus, expression level of fluorescence is used as criteria to predict the most robust combination with least variance.