Design of Robust Synthetic Genetic Oscillators Based on RSGA

Synthetic biology is highly valued in the recent decade. In a previous study, Elowitz and Leibler (Nature, vol. 403, pp. 335-338, 2000) have constructed a biological oscillator in consisting of three genes, and found out its mathematical expressions. Designing the optimal transcription rates of mRNA and the decay rates of protein concentration to track desired sinusoidal signal and achieve the best oscillation have been becoming a challenge problem since then. Actually, design of an oscillator can be regarded as a tracking design problem from the control engineer's viewpoint. Genetic algorithm (GA) bears the feature of searching the global optimum for the optimization problem. However, subject to the fixed solution structure, the results may not be the cheap ones. In this paper, we introduce the real structure genetic algorithm (RSGA) to solve the design problem of synthetic biological oscillators. The design approach is shown to be capable of yielding genetic oscillators with a cheaper structure.