Webinar: The Expert Approach to Preclinical Indirect Calorimetry Experiments by InsideScientific

The Expert Approach to Preclinical Indirect Calorimetry Experiments

About

Understanding the complex factors influencing body weight and metabolism is a long-standing challenge. A careful balance of energy intake, absorption, and expenditure is needed to maintain a consistent body weight. Scientists have used gas exchange measurements of oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production for centuries to non-invasively estimate whole-body energy expenditure. However, inconsistent use of units and faulty data normalization methods across studies has slowed progress in this field.

Here, we describe standardized guidelines for visualizing and analyzing indirect calorimetry data to ensure meaningful comparisons. These have been established by the International Indirect Calorimetry Consensus Committee (IICCC) to enable data sharing and aggregation. These standards have allowed the creation of a much-needed data repository. Generating an in-depth machine-readable data repository will enable the utilization of improved analysis techniques.

In this webinar, we discuss cutting edge experiments using Sable Systems Promethion indirect calorimeter to determine energy balance from measures of food intake and energy expenditure. We will examine best practices to ensure quality control for experiments. And the future of physiology research by merging calorimetry data and with continuous glucose monitoring, brain activity measurement, chemogenetics, optogenetics and stable isotope tracer analysis. Lastly we will present the framework for large-scale indirect calorimetry data sharing.

Key Topics:

Analysis of metabolic rates and food intake should never be normalized to body mass

Routine quality control of datasets is essential for high quality data

Analysis of energy balance can help to visualize and predict changes in body weight

Presenter

Alexander Banks, PhD

Associate Professor of Medicine, Director of the Energy Balance Core Facility, Chairman of the International Indirect Calorimetry Consensus Committee; Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Investigations in the Banks lab focus on understanding the mechanisms linking obesity with insulin resistance. The goal of this work is to provide new insights that may lead to novel therapeutic interventions. Approaches used in their work include pharmacologic and genetic approaches in mice and in human cells to mechanistically model aspects of metabolic disease.

Dr. Banks received his PhD from Columbia University, and performed postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University and also at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Banks is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in the Division of Endocrinology. He is the director of the Energy Balance Core Facility. He serves as chairman of the International Indirect Calorimetry Consensus Committee, a group dedicated to establishing standards for analysis methods that promote greater portability, transparency, and reproducibility in metabolic research.

Their group has also developed software for the analysis of indirect calorimetry and energy balance experiments. This free program, CalR, has been used to analyze more than 90,000 experiments worldwide and has established new global standards for the field.

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Obesity and Metabolic Disease

Diabetes

Neuroscience

Exercise Physiology

Cardiovascular Science

Pharmacology

Drug Discovery

Other

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