Application of the Taguchi method in poultry science: estimation of thein vitrooptimum intrinsic phytase activity of rye, wheat and barley

Abstract

1. In poultry investigations, the main interest is often to study the effects of many factors simultaneously. Two or three level factorial designs are the most commonly used for this type of investigation. However, it is often too costly to perform when number of factors increase. So a fractional factorial design, which is a subset or a fraction of a full factorial design, is an alternative. The Taguchi method has been proposed for simplifying and standardising fractional factorial designs. 2. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the applicability of the Taguchi method to optimise in vitro intrinsic phytase activity (IPA) of rye, wheat and barley under different culture conditions. 3. In order to have a solid base for judging the suitability of the Taguchi method, the results of the Taguchi method were compared with those of an experiment that was conducted as a 3(4) full factorial arrangement with three feed ingredients (rye, wheat and barley), three temperatures (20°C, 38°C and 55°C), three pH values (3.0, 5.5 and 8.0) and three incubation times (30, 60 and 120 min), with two replicates per treatment. 4. After data collection, a Taguchi L 9 (3(4)) orthogonal array was used to estimate the effects of different factors on the IPA, based on a subset of only 9 instead of 81 treatments. The data were analysed with both Taguchi and full factorial methods and the main effects and the optimal combinations of these 4 factors were obtained for each method. 5. The results indicated that according to both the full factorial experimental design and the Taguchi method, the optimal culture conditions were obtained with the following combination: rye, pH = 3, temperature = 20 °C and time of incubation = 30 min. The comparison between the Taguchi and full factorial results showed that the Taguchi method is a sufficient and resource saving alternative to the full factorial design in poultry science.

Improving seed germination of the eggplant rootstock Solanum torvum by testing multiple factors using an orthogonal array design

“…An alternative commonly used in industrial applications are orthogonal (Taguchi) arrays (Roy, 2010), which allow the main effects of a large number of factors to be estimated with a limited number of treatments. Although orthogonal arrays have been successfully applied to address the problem of determining adequate combinations of factors in biological and biotechnological processes (Rao et al, 2008;Assemi et al, 2012;Sedghi et al, 2014;Vasilev et al, 2014), their use for establishing seed germination protocols has been highly limited (Wu et al, 2011;Poinapen et al, 2013) and largely overlooked.…”

Increasing Production of Truffle Polysaccharides in the Solid-state Fermentation of <i>Tuber melanosporum</i> by Diosgenin Based on Orthogonal Matrix and Nonlinear Regression Analysis

“…Orthogonal design may save large and costly experiments when many factors are involved (Rao, et al, 2008). Orthogonal arrays have been successfully applied to address the problem of determining adequate combinations of factors in biological and biotechnological processes (Rao, et al, 2008;Assemi, et al, 2012;Sedghi, et al, 2014;Vasilev et al, 2014).Therefore, the L 50 (5 9 ) orthogonal experiment was designed to analyze the synergic effects between these factors and DS on production of extracellular polymeric substance (EPS). These abovementioned nine factors and five levels of each factor were shown in Table 1.…”

Free and immobilized Aspergillus oryzae SBS50 producing protease-resistant and thermostable phytase

“…Sequential statistical designs such as Plackett-Burman and response surface methodology (RSM) have been used widely for screening of media components to enhance phytase production to develop a cost-effective process (Chadha et al 2004;Satyanarayana 2006, 2008;Kumari et al 2016). Taguchi design is an easy and single statistical approach enabling the testing of large number of factors in less number of experiments (Sedghi et al 2014). This design is notonly useful for the identification of significant culture conditions but also can be used to study the interactions among significant factors and to find out their optimal concentrations.…”

“…However, there is no report on the use of Taguchi design for phytase production so far. Taguchi design has orthogonal arrays (OAs) that can reduce the number of experiments when compared with other factorial designs (Sedghi et al 2014).…”