CLARITY makes clear brains (and awesome GIFs)

CLARITY makes brains (and other tissue) clear.

“This is probably one of the most important advances for doing neuroanatomy in decades,” says Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, via Nature.

Learn how it works from Nature:

Researchers suspend tissue in a hydro-nanogel mesh, which allows them to wash away lipids (cellular components that prevent imaging directly through tissue) while maintaining a brain’s structural integrity. Now, as you see in the image below, they can look straight through whole sections of tissue.

Want more?

Read the paper in Nature. Joe Hanson of It’s Okay To Be Smart created the following CLARITY GIFs to showcase just how spectacular this technique is: