Journal Article

Tissue clearing and its applications in neuroscience

Chédotal Alain, Chung Kwanghun, Keller, Philipp J, Ueda, Hiroki R, Ertürk, Ali, Gradinaru Viviana, Tomancak Pavel

2020

Overview

State-of-the-art tissue-clearing methods provide subcellular-level optical access to intact tissues from individual organs and even to some entire mammals. When combined with light-sheet microscopy and automated approaches to image analysis, existing tissue-clearing methods can speed up and may reduce the cost of conventional histology by several orders of magnitude. In addition, tissue-clearing chemistry allows whole-organ antibody labelling, which can be applied even to thick human tissues. By combining the most powerful labelling, clearing, imaging and data-analysis tools, scientists are extracting structural and functional cellular and subcellular information on complex mammalian bodies and large human specimens at an accelerated pace. The rapid generation of terabyte-scale imaging data furthermore creates a high demand for efficient computational approaches that tackle challenges in large-scale data analysis and management. In this Review, we discuss how tissue-clearing methods could provide an unbiased, system-level view of mammalian bodies and human specimens and discuss future opportunities for the use of these methods in human neuroscience.Tissue-clearing methods are now allowing 3D imaging of intact tissues and some entire mammals. In this Review, Ueda and colleagues discuss the various tissue-clearing methods, related techniques and data analysis and management, as well as the application of these methods in neuroscience.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Subject: Data analysis / Data processing / Image processing / Labeling / Nervous system / Neurosciences / Structure-function relationships