Looks like the world of science has made another ground breaking leap. A group of European scientists have explored a method that can turn a regular animal cadaver into something transparent and bendy. In addition to that, the transparent animal has shrunk to a third of its original size. This procedure will hopefully be applied to the human brain, scientists hope.
A brain researcher at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany, Ali Ertürk wrote to NBC News,"Now, for the first time, we have a powerful tool that can make the human brain transparent and reduce it size to fit an imaging microscope for mapping. We expect that this method is easily applicable to small monkeys, even to a whole human brain in the near future,"
The uDISCO technique may even be useful for neurologists as they'll be able to examine how the neurons are laid out without having to perform surgery. Yet, a lot of testing needs to be done before it can be used on a real human brain.
Wall Street Journal reports that the German scientists had to remove the skin from the animal before they started injecting a series of chemicals and bathing it with a dehydrating agent and an organic solvent. Since the fat makes the tissue look opaque, this allows the scientists to strip down the water and the lipids from the animal tissue.
This procedure could take several days to work, but once it has been completed - the shrinking process begins and it starts to remove the water from the body in order for it to shrink about 35 percent of its regular size. At this point, you can already fit the see through animal under the microscope.
This method is called ultimate DISCO (short for 3-D imaging of solvent-cleared organs). And it was devised not just to examine animal cadavers, scientists hope that they can perform the same technique on a whole unsliced human brain. Other than that, this is also an advantage for the animals - they no longer need to be killed for studies on their organs.
