Newly Developed Sugar Solution Turns Tissues Transparent in 3 Days

A team of Japanese researchers has found a new technique to make tissues transparent. The team has developed a new sugar and water based solution that makes tissues see-through in just three days. What is strikingly interesting about this sugar solution is that it does not disrupt the shape and chemical nature of the tissue samples.

The sugar solution developed by a team from the RIKEN Center for Developmental biology enables the researchers to gain detailed images of the biological structures such as the brain at an unprecedented resolution.

Prior to this new solution, research teams from the U.S. and Japan have also developed various techniques to turn biological samples transparent making it possible to take a deep look into biological structures.

But according to study lead, Dr. Takeshi Imai, these earlier techniques had certain limitations because they caused chemical and morphological damage to the samples and the procedures involved were time consuming.

But these limitations have been overcome in the new solution developed by Dr. Imai along with colleagues Drs. Meng-Tsen Ke and Satoshi Fujimoto. The new solution is 'SeeDB', an aqueous fructose solution.

SeeDB helped the researchers to turn mouse embryos and brains transparent in a matter of just three days without damaging any of the structures or the fluorescent dyes used to inject the embryos and brains.

This enabled them to view the neuronal circuitry of the mouse brain in a fluorescence microscope in the whole brain scale without any sectioning of the brain.

For the first time, the researchers could describe the detailed wiring patterns of commissural fibers connecting the right and left hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. Apart from this, they were able to visualize in three dimensions the wiring of mitral cells in the olfactory bulb, which is involved in the detection of smells, at single-fiber resolution.

The authors explained, "Because SeeDB is inexpensive, quick, easy and safe to use, and requires no special equipment, it will prove useful for a broad range of studies, including the study of neuronal circuits in human samples."

In the year 2011, a group of scientists from Japan's RIKEN Brain Science Institute developed a chemical reagent 'Scale' that makes the biological tissue transparent and set a pathway to optical imaging techniques. Scientists have used Scale to study neurons in the brains of mice at unprecedented levels. Scale did not alter the fluorescent labels and signaling and helped scientists visualize in 3D the intricate networks of neurons and blood vessels at sub cellular levels, reports io9.com

This latest study was reported in Nature Neuroscience.