title: A low-cost system to easily measure spontaneous physical activity in rodents.
abstract: Spontaneous physical activity (SPA) can be responsible for variations of a lot of physiological parameters at the molecular, cellular, tissue, and systemic levels. It is increasingly recognized that good understanding of a large part of experimental results requires weighting them by SPA in order to reduce variability and thus to decrease the number of animals necessary to conduct a study. However, because of the high cost of this equipment, only a few laboratories are equipped with such equipment to measure the SPA of their animals. Here we present an effective, adaptable, and affordable system to measure SPA in rodents based on video acquisition of the animal in its own environment. We compared results obtained with our system to those collected at the same time with a commercial system of actimetry recording, and we found a high degree of correlation between these two approaches (r = 0.93; P < 0.001). We also were able to detect small variations of SPA induced by a special environment like chronic hypoxia exposure (25% less spontaneous activity compared with animals in normoxia, P < 0.05) or during the circadian cycle (107% more activity during the nocturnal phase compared with the diurnal phase, P < 0.05).
authors.affiliation: INSERM, U1055, Laboratoire de Bioénergétique Fondamntale et Appliquée, Grenoble, France; Université Grenoble Alpes, LBFA, Grenoble, France;
authors.forename: Clovis
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chabert
authors.affiliation: Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP), Observatoire de Midi-Pyrénées, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, IRD, Toulouse, France; and.
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bottelin
authors.affiliation: INSERM, U1055, Laboratoire de Bioénergétique Fondamntale et Appliquée, Grenoble, France; Université Grenoble Alpes, LBFA, Grenoble, France; Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Grenoble, Grenoble, France.
authors.forename: Christophe
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pison
authors.affiliation: INSERM, U1055, Laboratoire de Bioénergétique Fondamntale et Appliquée, Grenoble, France; Université Grenoble Alpes, LBFA, Grenoble, France; herve.dubouchaud@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr.
authors.forename: Hervé
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Dubouchaud
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology; D000860:Hypoxia / Q000503:physiopathology; D008297:Male; D009043:Motor Activity / Q000502:physiology; D010805:Physical Conditioning, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D017208:Rats, Wistar; D012377:Rodentia / Q000502:physiology*; D014741:Video Recording / Q000379:methods*
keywords: actimetry; behavior; energy balance; home-cage activity; locomotion; spontaneous physical activity; video tracking