Hey there. For sexual PERFORMANCE you need to evaluate behavior, I think there is no other way besides behavior, so you will need female rats. But you can work with penile erection test, and sexual behavior with ovariectmized female rats induced with hormones. You can also invert the rat cycle, and work at day (you can manipulated the rat's circadian cycle and don't need to work at night).

But you can also see whethere is it gonna work (take a look): http://medicine.osu.edu/neuroscience/documents/The_Rat_As_A_Model.pdf

I'll look for other articles that could help you, than i'll post here

Hi, what u can do is to test the aphrodisiac on male mice, give it for 2 mths, then harvest the testis and do histopathology studies

Hey there. For sexual PERFORMANCE you need to evaluate behavior, I think there is no other way besides behavior, so you will need female rats. But you can work with penile erection test, and sexual behavior with ovariectmized female rats induced with hormones. You can also invert the rat cycle, and work at day (you can manipulated the rat's circadian cycle and don't need to work at night).

But you can also see whethere is it gonna work (take a look): http://medicine.osu.edu/neuroscience/documents/The_Rat_As_A_Model.pdf

I'll look for other articles that could help you, than i'll post here

Mariana is fully correct! First you have to define what you want to measure. If its performance (penile erection) you need the presence of females or at least female scent. Also there is no need for sophisticated video equipment for video analysis, a mobile phone with red sensitve chip and a low intensity red lamp should do to videotape behaviour in the active (dark) phase of the rats.

I agree that behaviour is better, also more ethical regarding the use of animals. A colleague of mine also used low intensity UV light which could work instead of red light, mainly due to logistics because that red sensitive chip and phone are not always easy to get, and with UV light the video could be recorded with a normal cámera. There is also the Fiji software to analyze video that could help and is open source http://fiji.sc/Fiji . On the other hand you could also take measurements of levels of the so called sex steroids, or may be just oxytocin levels in serum.

In addition to Patricias answer you can also collect faeces and measure testosterone and cortisol after exposure to potential aphrodisiacs. Testosterone should mark sexual interest and cortisol arousal. Henrik Oster in Lübeck has a protocol for that basing on initial experiments by Robert Dallmann. If you have no access to their papers I may send you a protocol. Of cause you need RIAs, ELISAs or HPLC to detect testosterone and cortisol, but maybe your chemistry department can help with that.

yeah that's great erik, i will be grateful if you could send me this paper , you too mariana. We have HPLC in our chemistry department, so i can deal with testosterone level. Sorry erik, but i don't really understand the need to collect faeces in aphrodisiacs potential testing???

What's more I've try to perform penile reflexes test (quick flips, long flips, erection) but no way, my wistar rats were so agitatd that they couldn't stay 2 minutes without moving, what inhibited my protocol.

take a look at this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1573401/

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0091305794905479

http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/53/3/417.full

http://jpet.aspetjournals.org/content/308/1/330.full

I hope that some one could help u.

Good lucky

@Mireille: my suggestion was to collect the faeces after an aphrodisiac administration to extract it and measure the testosterone and cortisol in it. The faeces reflects the arousal state just before defaecation and is not as irritating as blood sampling.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16505983

Ok thank you