Designing Robustness to Temperature in a Feedforward Loop Circuit

Incoherent feedforward loops represent important biomolecular circuit elements capable of a rich set of dynamic behavior including adaptation and pulsed responses. Temperature can modulate some of these properties through its effect on the underlying reaction rate parameters. It is generally unclear how to design such a circuit where the properties are robust to variations in temperature. Here, we address this issue using a combination of tools from control and dynamical systems theory as well as preliminary experimental measurements towards such a design. We formalize temperature as an uncertainty acting on system dynamics, exploring both structured and unstructured uncertainty representati