New 3D Imaging Technique May Drive Biological Insights

When it comes to learning more about biological organisms, 3D deep-imaging may be the future. A team of neuroscientists has devised a fast, inexpensive imaging method for probing the molecular intricacies of large biological samples in three dimensions, which could have far reaching implications for future investigations.

"What we did was optimize many different parameters of several existing techniques to create this powerful new labeling method," said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, one of the researchers, in a news release. "These optimization efforts paid off in spades, dramatically extending our ability to visualize molecular structures deep in intact complex tissues like the brain. Although developed in our laboratory to help us pursue neuroscience questions, we believe this new method will provide biological researchers in many disciplines with an important new tool for advancing their work."

The new method is called iDISCO. It optimizes techniques for deep tissue immunolabeling and then combines them with recent technological innovations in tissue clearing and light sheet microscopy to achieve unprecedented deep labeling and imaging of molecular structures in the brain, the kidney, and other organs and tissues in experimental settings.

"For us as neuroscientists, one of the big applications of this new imaging method has been the ability to visualize axonal pathways in the developing and adult brain," said Nicolas Renier," co-first author of the new study. "This opens entire new avenues to our research."

This advance creates a powerful method for imaging molecular structures deep in tissues that is much simpler and more rapid than previous approaches used by researchers. This means that the new imaging system could be huge when it comes to examining samples and understanding more about biological tissues. 

 The findings are published in the journal Cell.