A groundbreaking study has found ways to make bodies, organs and biopsies of human tissues see-through or transparent, now strengthening scientific research work without the need to cut through bodies for a peek and keeping connections and cellular structures intact.
The recent discovery finally fulfills the biologists’ long-time dream of having the ability to look through the bodies and organs to picture long-term connections between cells and cellular structures.
"Although the idea of tissue clearing has been around for a century, to our knowledge, this is the first study to perform whole-body clearing, as opposed to first extracting and then clearing organs outside the adult body," Viviana Gradinaru, senior author of the study, says in a statement.
Gradinaru adds that their methodology shows the potential of accelerating any scientific work that would likely benefit from mapping whole organisms, which includes the study on how peripheral organs and nerves can affect strongly the mental and cognition processing.
The latest study also says the procedures could make way for a better comprehension of body-brain interactions, far more correct disease monitoring and clinical diagnoses as well as a whole new generation of therapies for various health conditions.
The researchers earlier developed CLARITY, a technique on brain clearing that engages in implanting tissue into the hydrogels in order to conserve the 3D structure as well as relevant molecular features, before making use of detergents to extricate lipids that create an opaque tissue.
They then made CLARITY fitting for entire bodies and organs partly by developing a faster process, for the new study. Other than that, they also created a formula “for refractive index matching solution” that allows for the lasting storage of cleared tissue as well as imaging cleared and thick tissue with a traditional confocal microscope.
"Our easy-to-use tissue clearing protocols, which employ readily available and cost-effective reagents and equipment, will make the subcellular interrogation of large tissue samples an accessible undertaking within the broader research and clinical communities," says Gradinaru, who is from the California Institute of Technology.
The new methods and technologies, according to the scientists, will both advance the overarching goal of neuroscientists that is to create a brain connectome as well as facilitate the mapping of wider “brain-to-body-and-back connectome and phenotyping other organ systems in the body,” whether diseased or healthy.
You may read the full report on the study at Cell journal available online.
