All About CLARITY: Scientists Develop See-Through Brain A multidisciplinary team from Stanford University School of Medicine has combined neuroscience and chemical engineering to develop a process that renders a mouse braintransparent, no slicing required. Not sliced or sectioned in any way, the postmortem brain remains whole with its 3D complexity of fine wiring and molecular structure completely intact and able to be measured using visible light and chemicals. The new process is called CLARITY, and it ushers in an entirely new era of whole-organ imaging that could fundamentally change our understanding of the brain and other organs.Bioengineer and psychiatrist Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, led the team whose findings are published online in the journal Nature. “Studying intact systems with this sort of molecular resolution and global scope — to be able to see the fine detail and the big picture at the same time — has been a major unmet goal in biology, and a goal that CLARITYbegins to address,” Deisseroth said. “This feat of chemical engineering promises to transform the way we study the brain’s anatomy and how disease changes it,” said Thomas Insel, MD, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “No longer will the in-depth study of our most important three-dimensional organ be constrained by two-dimensionalmethods.” Primarily, the research in this study was conducted on a mouse brain. However, CLARITY has been tested on zebrafish and on preserved human brain samples. The results were similar to the mouse brain, establishing a potential path for studies of human samplesand other organisms. “CLARITY promises to revolutionize our understanding of how local and global changes in brain structure and activity translate into behavior,” said Paul Frankland, PhD, a senior scientist in neurosciences and mental health at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute (SickKids) in Toronto.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 02:38:15 +0000
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