TPCdesign: A guide to designing informative thermal performance experiments

TPCdesign enables more accurate thermal performance curve estimation with fewer temperature treatments by optimizing experimental design for nonlinear and asymmetric responses.

• Why it matters: Accurately estimating thermal performance curves is essential for understanding biological traits across temperature ranges, but experiments are costly and require efficient planning.
• What they did: The R package TPCdesign employs a pseudo-Bayesian D-optimal design approach, incorporating prior knowledge and practical constraints to select the most informative temperature treatments.
• The result: Optimized designs improve the accuracy of TPC recovery, especially for asymmetric curves and limited treatments, enabling better resource allocation and more precise biological insights.