Stain Removal

To make sense of the vast detail in any biological sample, most microscopy techniques hone in on one particular aspect or another, often staining or altering the tissue to make certain structures or molecules more visible. This approach has brought great insights, but it does limit the information each precious sample can provide, and in isolating and interfering with samples it’s possible to introduce changes that cloud your conclusions. A new approach to imaging kidney tissue avoids any staining or chemical alteration by using three imaging techniques simultaneously to observe multiple molecular and structural features at once (pictured, a composite image from a diabetic patient’s biopsy with each colour layer showing additional information, such as saturated fatty acids in green, collagen in pink, and many more). Capturing multiple features in one sample helps show relationships between molecular and structural processes, and could provide much-needed improvements to kidney disease diagnosis.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Anthony A. Fung and colleagues
• Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, May 2025