The Respirometry Blog

Distinguishing individual food uptake in communally housed mice using RFID

Submitted by John on Wed, 07/10/2013 - 16:43

Mice are communal beasts, just like rats. They live in groups, and separating them - as required for measuring food intake / food uptake or energy expenditure - stresses them, elevating cortisol levels and leading to to a host of unwanted side-effects. Using the right technology, however, obtaining separate food uptake recordings from communally housed mice is straightforward. This short article demonstrates just such an application, combining a Promethion mass measurement module (2 mg resolution) with RFID.

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A solution for bulk photosynthetic efficiency screening

Submitted by John on Fri, 03/22/2013 - 16:37

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 the metabolic rate of a rat. So, for once, with the help of Thomas Förster (Senior Research Scientist at Sable Systems, which is to say he actually made the measurements and did all the hard work), I thought: What about using the system to measure photosynthesis?

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The "Deep Data Field System" in Metabolic Phenotyping

Submitted by John on Tue, 01/29/2013 - 17:44

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 need for which was not anticipated at the time of the study. This can save serious amounts of time and money - apart from producing better science.

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Activity Metabolism Measurements Made Easy in Metabolic Phenotyping

Submitted by John on Tue, 10/30/2012 - 15:31

Correlating activity and energy expenditure in "legacy" metabolic phenotyping systems is almost impossible. However, the new Promethion-C parallel, continuous metabolic phenotyping system makes it easy. We demonstrate this by extracting data on the metabolic cost of a specific activity from a Promethion-C continuous, parallel metabolic phenotyping system - data that normally requires a treadmill, a skilled human operator, extensive training, and a lot of stress for all concerned. And we conclusively prove that we can do it accurately, on multiple animals simultaneously, and without stress.

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How Multiplexing Distorts Metabolic Phenotyping Data

Submitted by John on Tue, 09/11/2012 - 11:01

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!

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