Clear as Rainbows

Finding a cell in a tissue can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. That’s why before imaging tissues, researchers make them transparent in a process called tissue clearing. However, current tissue-clearing techniques are complicated, time-consuming and weaken the signal of fluorescent tags used to label proteins. Researchers now present a fast, convenient method to clear tissues using an alkaline solution — the alkaline environment maintains the fluorescence of the most commonly used fluorescent tag, GFP, and its variants. The solution effectively cleared slices of human brains, mouse brains (pictured) and other mouse organs, and was compatible with various fluorescent tags and dyes. This allowed the team to clearly track fluorescently-tagged nerve fibres (left and middle zoom) through the full depth of the tissue (end panel) – different depths are represented by different colours. This approach also enabled 3D reconstructions, cell counting and other helpful measures for biomedical research.

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.

• Image from work by Qing-Hong Shan and colleagues
• University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in BMC Biology, March 2022