Last year, Stanford bioengineer Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, and colleagues in his lab announced their development of CLARITY, a process that renders tissue transparent, sparking excitement among the scientific community. As explained in the above video, released yesterday by the National Science Foundation, researchers had been unable to directly study the human brain's circuitry because much of the organ is covered in an opaque tissue. But using CLARITY researchers can "chemically dissolve the opaque tissue in a post-mortem brain, and in place of that tissue, they insert a transparent hydrogel that keeps the brain intact and provides a window into the brain’s neural structure and circuitry." For this reason, the technique is "hailed as an important advance in whole-brain imaging."
Previously: Process that creates transparent brain named one of year’s top scientific discoveries, An in-depth look at the career of Stanford’s Karl Deisseroth, “a major name in science", Peering deeply – and quite literally – into the intact brain: A video fly-through and Lightning strikes twice: Optogenetics pioneer Karl Deisseroth’s newest technique renders tissues transparent, yet structurally intact
