Metabolic rate is often measured as a phenotype in evolutionary genetics, among other fields including many facets of physiology, behavior, and ecology, because it impacts organismal fitness, is repeatable and heritable, and is responsive to numerous environmental variables. Aquatic respirometry, a method used to measure metabolic rate, has allowed key questions in these fields to be investigated, namely: (1) why do individuals from the same population exhibit up to 3-fold differences in metabolic rate, (2) how does metabolic rate change during an individual’s lifetime, and (3) what metabolic rate is advantageous in a specific environment? Current respirometry studies often suffer from small sample sizes and rely on low throughput approaches to measure metabolic rate, making it difficult to answer these and other relevant ecological and evolutionary questions due to lack of power, failure to capture true biological variation, and confounding variables, like time, that are introduced due to limitations in methodology. Here we describe a scalable high-throughput intermittent flow respirometer (HIFR) design and use it to measure the metabolic rates of 19 aquatic animals in one night while reducing equipment costs and time by more than 50%.

中文翻译：

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小型水生动物高通量呼吸测量的创新装置

代谢率通常作为进化遗传学中的一种表型来衡量，在其他领域包括生理学、行为学和生态学的许多方面，因为它影响生物体的适应性，是可重复和可遗传的，并且对许多环境变量有反应。水生呼吸测量法是一种用于测量代谢率的方法，可以研究这些领域的关键问题，即：（1）为什么来自同一群体的个体的代谢率差异高达 3 倍，（2）一个人一生中的代谢率变化，以及（3）在特定环境中什么样的代谢率是有利的？当前的呼吸测量研究通常样本量小，并且依赖于低通量方法来测量代谢率，由于缺乏力量、未能捕捉到真正的生物变异以及由于方法论的限制而引入的混杂变量（如时间），因此难以回答这些和其他相关的生态和进化问题。在这里，我们描述了一种可扩展的高通量间歇流量呼吸计 (HIFR) 设计，并使用它在一晚内测量 19 种水生动物的代谢率，同时将设备成本和时间减少 50% 以上。