Clear as MAX

To really understand the complexity of our tissues, you need to peel back the layers to see what’s happening on the inside. 3D imaging allows researchers to do this while keeping tissues perfectly intact. However, to get the clearest images, tissues must first be made transparent using a laborious process called tissue clearing. In a bid to simplify this process, researchers focused on one crucial stage that usually involves multiple steps – changing the tissue's refractive index, that is, how it bends light. The team developed a new recipe for the solution into which tissues are placed during the clearing process. This solution, called MAX, allowed the refractive index to be changed in one simple step. MAX was successfully tested on tissues from humans, mice, rats, chickens and zebrafish, as pictured here using fluorescence microscopy of the blood vessels (red) and neurons (green) of a whole mouse brain.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Boram Lee and colleagues
• Department of Anatomy, Brain Korea 21 Plus Program for Biomedical Science, Korea
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Scientific Reports, November 2022