Metabolic Profiling of Stressed Rats

At the end of the stress intervention period, rats were scheduled to be kept in Calo-cages of the PhenoMaster system (TSE, Berlin, Germany) individually, at normal room temperature and humidity. For acclimatization to the separate Calo-cages, the first 6 h of measurement were not used for analysis [17 (link)]. The PhenoMaster system automatically records measurements of oxygen volume (VO₂), carbon dioxide volume (VCO₂), respiratory quotient (RQ = VCO₂/VO₂), and total energy expenditure (TEE). The TEE was represented as the amount of energy expenditure in kcal/hour/kg of body weight, and kcal/hour/kg of lean body mass (LBM), which was estimated to be 0.75% of the whole-body weight [18 (link)]. Automatic food intake (FI) measurement was performed and represented as g/day [11 (link)].