respirometry.org

BLOGS

Measuring food uptake differentially

Let’s say you need to measure the food uptake of an experimental animal, which of course could mean any creature, including you. For the sake of simplicity, imagine a mouse or a rat feeding intermittently from a food hopper. You’d think that all you needed to do was weigh the hopper…

diet, food intake, food uptake, metabolic phenotyping, mouse chow, rat chow, water content

May 23, 2025
Data, data, data!

This shows a day’s worth of data from a single mouse in graphic form, recorded by a Promethion-C system for a research study on which I’m collaborating. The time resolution of the data set is one second. Loads of additional data (such as XY position and so on) didn’t make it…

body mass, data, food uptake, metabolic measurement, metabolic phenotyping, more data, RQ, VCO2, VH2O, VO2, water uptake

May 23, 2025
Automated behavior analysis: The basics of EthoScan

When mice (or rats) are wandering around their Promethion system cages and simply being mice (or rats), they interact with the various sensors in their cages – the mass sensors attached to their food and water dispensers, their body mass sensor, their running wheel, and their X-Y open-field position sensor, for…

automated behavior analysis, behavioral transition matrix, ethogram, locomotion budget, time budget

May 23, 2025
The future of metabolic phenotyping

The essence of metabolic phenotyping is accurate metabolic measurement. As a matter of convenience, cost and feasibility, practically all metabolic phenotyping systems operate in a multiplexed mode, in which a single gas analysis chain is shared between multiple animals, typically 8, 10, 16 or more. Cycle times between metabolic measurements for…

metabolic measurement, metabolic phenotyping, metabolic screening, respirometry

May 23, 2025
Welcome to the revitalized Respirometry.org!

Just a quick post to let the teeming multitudes (all three of you) know that Respirometry.org’s long stasis is at an end. I’ll be posting new content on a regular basis, much of it available nowhere else. I’ll be blogging muchly about Promethion, a new metabolic measurement system for biomedical researchers,…

metabolic measurement, metabolic phenotyping, respirometry

May 23, 2025
Thoughts on Apple

I’ve written quite a lot of scientific data acquisition and analysis software, some of which – like Datacan and ExpeData – are in use in many laboratories around the world. I’m often asked: Why don’t you write software for Apple computers rather than PCs? There’s a reason, or maybe a couple…

Apple, data acquisition, Steve Jobs

May 23, 2025