Peripheral Vision

Tissue clearing allows the structural preservation of proteins in a tissue, or whole organism, while rendering the specimen transparent. This enables light-microscope imaging of cells and structures within much thicker sections of tissue than would otherwise be possible. Now, scientists have stretched the capabilities of this technique to generate the first ever fluorescence imaging of the entire peripheral nervous system of a mouse. The whole-body tissue clearing required decalcification and delipidation (chemical removal of the animal’s bones and fat), and this was followed by fluorescent immunostaining (antibody-based protein tagging) of the nerve structures. The specimen was then embedded in a hydrogel block and repeatedly sliced and imaged until the entire length of the body had been systematically captured. The 3D reconstruction of those images (shown) offers an unprecedented view of the cellular circuitry of the peripheral nerves and sets the stage for similar studies of such wiring during development and disease.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Video from work by Mei-Yu Shi, Yuchen Yao and Miao Wang, and colleagues
• Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale; Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, CAS Key Laboratory of Brain Function & Disease, University of Science & Technology of China, Anhui, China
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Cell, July 2025