Hydrostatic pressure and cellular respiration: are the values observed post-decompression representative of the reality under pressure?
Résumé
The goal of this article was to assess whether a pressure change can constitute a bias of interpretation of pressure effects on pressure-acclimatized fishes. This work consisted first in a study of the recompression effects of mitochondrial extracts from eels pressure-acclimatized; and then in a study of red muscle fibre compression/decompression. The first experimental series shows a decrease of mitochondrial performances after recompression when compared with the decompressed group. It is concluded that recompression does not allow to get rid of decompression effects. This is confirmed by the second experimental series which show that a decompression induces a stronger reduction of MO2 than the previous compression.