14 DAY TRIAL // A report published in the online scientific journal Nature on April 10 details how specialist Karl Deisseroth and his fellow Stanford University in California researchers succeeded in making mouse brains become completely transparent.
The scientists explain that, in order to roll out these see-through mouse brains, they took run-of-the-mill ones and treated them with a concoction made up of several chemicals.
It was this chemical treatment (i.e. detergent SDS) that turned the mouse brains transparent by stripping away the lipids that are typically found inside a brain and which are responsible for blocking the passage of light.
Up until the development of this technique, those wishing to study a given brain's make-up had to resort to studying slices of the brain under the microscope, and later on use the data collected in this manner to reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the brain they were analyzing.
However, thanks to CLARITY, as this technique of turning whole organs see-through is called, researchers can get an unprecedented view at neural networks while these are still in their three-dimensional form, sources say.
Having gained access to the neural networks found inside the brains they turned transparent, the researchers were able to create visualizations of them.
“Obtaining high-resolution information from a complex system, while maintaining the global perspective needed to understand system function, represents a key challenge in biology,” the researchers write in the abstract to their paper.
“Here we address this challenge with a method (termed CLARITY) for the transformation of intact tissue into a nanoporous hydrogel-hybridized form (crosslinked to a three-dimensional network of hydrophilic polymers) that is fully assembled but optically transparent and macromolecule-permeable,” they went on to argue.
It is to be expected that it will not be long until CLARITY will be used to better chart the make-up of healthy brains, and even research both various brain disorders and the process of aging.
Check out the video below for more information on CLARITY.
