|
|
Non-Invasive Body Composition Analysis in Small Animals
APS Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology Section
Tim R. Nagy and John R. Speakman
J.P. Hayes, C. Selman, H. Visser and Dympna Gallagher
Many studies in comparative physiology require knowledge of the body
composition of animals under study, since this is often used as a proxy for
animal fitness. There are two methods available for this work. Chemical
analysis, which results in the death of the subject animal, but is very
accurate and precise, and non-invasive approaches in which the subject
lives, but accuracy and precision are lower. Given the increasing ethical
dimension in all scientific work the impetus is to adopt non-invasive
methods – but this requires a rigorous assessment of the errors involved in
the measurements and whether the resultant data are of practical use in the
particular context. Indeed the question arises as to whether it is ethically
more sound to use a non-invasive approach that is scientifically useless. In
this symposium speakers will provide backgrounds on five separate
non-invasive approaches and evaluate for each the theoretical basis of the
methodology and the accuracy and precision of the methods compared with the
gold standard approach of chemical analysis. Although we consider this
symposium will be of primary interest to comparative field biologists, the
need in the post genomics era to obtain rapid phenotypes for animals means
that the topic will also be of interest to those scientists who run
laboratories where small rodents are routinely evaluated for body
composition.
|
|
