Microcalorimetric measurements of heat production in rabbit alveolar macrophages

Abstract

There is a need for short-term tests for characterization of toxic effects of environmental pollutants without employing expensive and time-consuming animal experiments. One approach is to monitor changes of the total metabolism of an exposed cell population in vitro. For this reason we have studied the heat production of rabit alveolar macrophages. A thermopile heat conduction microcalorimeter (LKB BioActivity Monitor) was used to measure the heat production rate from monolayers of macrophages (50 000–180 000 cells) leading to a power value of 24 ± 3 pW/cell (37 °C, pH= 7.40).