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A solution for bulk photosynthetic efficiency screening

Sometimes strange ideas come into my head. Most of the time, being too busy to act on them, I shoo them away and get on with my life. On this one occasion, though, we had a continuous metabolic measurement system already set up, and were about to use it for measuring…

photosynthetic efficiency, plant screening

May 23, 2025
The “Deep Data Field System” in Metabolic Phenotyping

Data from a metabolic phenotyping system can be rigidly determined by the parameters entered at the time of the experiment (as with legacy systems), or the data can be a rich mine of information, with complete post-hoc analytical flexibility (as with Promethion). The latter approach allows extraction of experimental data, the…

activity metabolism, data analysis, data field system, light field camera, metabolic phenotyping, metabolic rate

May 23, 2025
Activity Metabolism Measurements Made Easy in Metabolic Phenotyping

One of the classic controversies in the field of metabolic science is the effect of activity on overall energy expenditure. As a comparative physiologist with a long-standing interest in energetics (and several papers published in that field), I find this controversy to be particularly strange, especially because some respectable and intelligent…

activity metabolism, cost of transport, energy expenditure, metabolic phenotyping

May 23, 2025
How Multiplexing Distorts Metabolic Phenotyping Data

Multiplexing metabolic signals causes significant data distortion. This post explains how, and gives you access to an amazing, interactive tool for exploring the metabolic data distortions produced by this practically universally-used technique! To save cost, almost all metabolic phenotyping systems multiplex their gas analyzers, so that the air streams from the…

gas analysis, metabolic measurement, metabolic phenotyping, multiplexing

May 23, 2025
Three reasons for misleading gas analyzer accuracy specifications

A funny thing happened on my way to helping a colleague make sense of the specifications of a metabolic phenotyping system. There were many strange things to mull over. Not the least of these were oxygen and carbon dioxide analyzer accuracy specifications that appeared to be the product of smoke, mirrors,…

accuracy, CO2 analyzer, metabolic phenotyping, O2 analyzer, resolution

May 23, 2025
Data Visualizations you haven’t Seen Before…

OK, imagine a mouse in a cage. With Promethion, you can monitor that mouse’s position to within a calculated centroid of 2.5 mm (several times higher resolution than legacy systems). You do this with an infrared light array. So, what do you do with those data? Well, you can of course…

behavior metabolism correlation, correlation, energetics, open field, position detection, XY array

May 23, 2025