In our studies, lipid extraction (folch method) combined TC/TG quantification of liver tissues is the best way to approaching your question directly. However, ORO will be conducted as an additional data. If you do all analysis I had said, you could avoid the chellange from editor.
The publications of our team.
Article Beneficial effects of noni (Morinda citrifolia L.) juice on ...
Article Effects of chicken-liver hydrolysates on lipid metabolism in...
Thank you very much for your comments. I don't think Oil Red is that useful at quantifying lipid accumulation. Sure it's a nice visual add-on to have and AFAIK there is an ImageJ macro that is semi-quantitative, but how many slides do you usually look at? Slides from different liver regions in each animal or from the same region in all animals? What staining controls are used?
Lipid extraction from the whole of the liver (or at least a the same lobe in all animals) is a pretty good way of quantifying lipid accumulation.
The disadvantage of both methods is that you can only do an endpoint - ie you have to kill the animal. Of course you can have control groups, but it would be much nicer to follow individual animals from before treatment to after. That should reduce the variation in the data and produce moch more accurate data... would probably reduce the number of mice needed (and when working with transgenics that is a significant cost).
That's why I was looking at non-invasive methods, but seems like only MRI or MRS are quantitative. MRI seems to be dependent on a number of variables too:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22372668
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20355234
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24047718
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24178986
Yes, I was looking at the EchoMRI.
I was hoping to get some opinions from people who have been using non-invasive methods.