Sugar Syrup Makes Internal Organs Transparent
Mouse Tissues Before and After Translucent Treatment This photo shows tissues before (top row) and after (bottom row) treatment with SeeDB. From left to right, the tissues are: a piece of an adult mouse brain, a whole newborn mouse brain and a mouse embryo. RIKEN A new lab technique helps scientists study cells inside entire organs or embryos. This new technique for making cool-looking clear organs sometimes sounds more like a fancy recipe than a lab procedure. It uses a sugar syrup to strip colors from mouse brains and embryos, so that scientists can study them. The technique, dubbed See Deep Brain or SeeDB, is one of several that scientists have recently developed for making see-through bodily organs. The lab procedure helps researchers study things like how brain cells interact with each other in an intact brain. Before transparency techniques were developed, scientists usually examined organs by using machines to cut impossibly...