An imaging technique lets scientists peer through the skin of a whole mouse or rat to examine its organs after death.

Credit: Nature Methods

Ali Ertürk of the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany and his colleagues created a technique called ultimate DISCO (uDISCO), which removes pigments and lipids from the tissues of dead animals using an organic solvent. This leaves the organs and skin intact but transparent, while preserving genetically encoded fluorescent proteins. The method revealed the nervous system of a mouse in stark detail.

uDISCO also shrinks bodies by up to 65%, making it possible to image whole animals using light-sheet microscopy, which excels at imaging smaller samples.

Nature Methods http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3964 (2016)