Monday, 16 June 2014
Making the Brain Transparent To Explore It More Easily
A relatively new technique can now perform the amazing feat of making a mouse’s brain completely transparent (This same technique has been tried on human brains as well, but so far has succeeded in making only parts of them transparent.)
But enabling scientists to see through the brain would be merely an interesting curiosity if this technique—dubbed “Clarity” by the team that developed it—did not also preserve the brain’s entire underlying cellular and molecular structure, so that existing methods of staining and tracing nerve bundles can be applied to the brain once it has been rendered transparent. The neural pathways throughout the mouse brain thus become visible in the finest detail, while the transparency of the tissues enables researchers to obtain a far more comprehensive overview of the axonal pathways than was ever possible before. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex, Uncategorized | Comments Closed
