Invention:
University of Arizona researchers have developed a way of measuring and studying neonatal rodents' breathing activity and metabolic rate simultaneously using this homemade dual chamber technology. This inexpensive and simple tool is also useful for comparing the ventilatory and metabolic responses to various stressors, including hypoxia, acute inflammatory episodes, heat and cold stress, air pollutants, maternal separation, and more in control and test subjects.
Background:
Pulmonary ventilation testing in small rodents can be very expensive and technically difficult. Moreover, the rate of lung ventilation depends primarily on the whole-body metabolic rate. This device provides an inexpensive approach for assessing both variables simultaneously in neonatal rodents using a dual-chamber plethysmograph.
Applications:
- Measure pulmonary ventilation and metabolic rates simultaneously
- Pulmonary physiology in health and disease
- Studies of breathing control during physiologic stress
- Ventilatory phenotyping of genetically engineered neonatal rodents, or animals exposed to toxins (e.g., nicotine, alcohol) in the perinatal period
Advantages:
- Inexpensive alternative to expensive commercial systems
- Just as accurate as gold standard approaches
- Easy to construct and use in the pre-clinical research laboratory
