A Clear Look

Getting a first look at your holiday photos once required days of waiting while they were developed in a specialist shop, but is now instant on your phone. A similar revolution may be coming to the patience-testing practice of tissue clearing: the process of rendering biological tissue transparent to open up their inner workings to microscope scrutiny, in part by removing much of the fatty material (lipids) that blocks light. Existing approaches take days and can cause damage or strip out important details. A new three-step technique shaves days off the process by only partially removing lipids, leaving essential cell architecture intact and maintaining fluorescent labels (pictured, a mouse brain slice with genetically labelled immune cells in red and cyan fluorescence marking cell nuclei). The system worked well in tests on human tissue and whole mouse organs, providing a faster, non-toxic, high fidelity way to get a clear picture.

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 Daniel D. Lee and Kevin A. Telfer, and colleagues
• Department of Pathology & Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Scientific Reports, August 2025