Super Clear

Faced with finding one person in a crowd, wouldn’t it be great if you could see through everyone like superman? That’s what tissue clearing does. It makes tissues transparent so fluorescently-tagged proteins or cells can be more clearly imaged at greater depths. However, current tissue-clearing processes are lengthy and complex. Researchers now present a simple, rapid tissue-clearing method, EZ Clear, which can clear whole adult mouse organs, genetically engineered with fluorescent-tagged proteins, in just three steps over two days at room temperature. Tissues are kept hydrated to preserve fluorescent signals and tissue dimensions. After clearing and imaging, EZ Clear also allows tissues to be further processed for other experiments without losing their fluorescent signals. Lightsheet imaging of one half of a mouse brain cleared with EZ Clear (left) compared with its other half cleared with traditional methods (right) highlights the clarity EZ Clear provides.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Video from work by Chih-Wei Hsu and colleagues
• Department of Integrative Physiology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, October 2022