October 13 (Thu), 12:10-13:00, Rm. 308

Making tissue transparent has tremendous advantages and potentials for 3D imaging of large tissues or even whole organisms. In this short talk, I will present polymer-based tissue processing technique which offers fastest, reliable and scalable tissue clearing.

Various tissue clearing technologies have been developed for 3D volume imaging which allows visualization of structural organization of organs at the cellular level without tissue sectioning. Among them, CLARITY technique removes lipid components, a major light scattering source in the biological samples, from tissues which are embedded with hydrogel as a structural alternative to lipids. CLARITY and related techniques are well recognized as a compatible method for immune labeling of various biomolecules due to the porous property of tissue-hydrogel hybrids. However, wide applications of CLARITY has been limited by several drawbacks of the original do-it-yourself (DIY) design. Recently, Logos Biosystems has developed the X-CLARITY Tissue Clearing System, which enables rapid and reproducible clearing of various tissues or whole bodies within a day while preserving tissue architecture and signals form endogenous fluorescence proteins. The speed and consistency of this system will accelerate high-content mapping and analysis of cellular structures of intact organs.