Clearing the View

For hundreds of years, scientists have been able to make very thin slices of tissue optically transparent by ‘clearing’ them, as being able to see inside tissues is key to understanding fully how organs work. Now, a process called PARS (perfusion-assisted agent release in situ) allows ‘whole-body clearing’ – making intact organs transparent. Following this, fluorescent chemicals are injected into the body, highlighting specific cells and structures deep within the tissues, and enabling them to be seen clearly under a microscope. These high-magnification images show a detailed view of the glomeruli of the kidneys after they’ve been made transparent and stained. This technique will allow organ systems to be elucidated – in fact, the entire nervous system of a mouse is currently being mapped – and could drastically improve diagnosing diseases in humans.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image by Viviana Gradinaru and colleagues
• California Institute of Technology
• Copyright Elsevier 2014
• Research published in Cell, August 2014