Team:ETH Zurich/Modeling/Analysis

From 2011.igem.org

Can you feel the smoke tonight?

Sensitivity Analysis

Sensitivity analysis is a technique that studies the change of the output (or any observable) of a certain function with variation of a certain parameter. It gives as an overview how sensitive the model is with respect to the parameter, i.e. what the impact of the parameter is. The sensitivity is defined as a partial differential equation of the observable with respect to a certain parameter.

Since we consider acetaldehyde as a parameter in our model, we did sensitivity analysis with respect to acetaldehyde. For different acetaldehyde concentrations we monitored the change in the GFP output (dGFP/dAcetaldehyde). It can be seen from the figure below that the sensitivity is highest when GFP rises. For the peak itself (at [AA] = 1000uM), the sensitivity drops down and then rises again once GFP concentration starts decreasing. This tells us that the GFP concentration level is most sensitive to acetaldehyde at those acetaldehyde concentrations when GFP rises and falls.

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