Tissue Clearing
Tissue clearing is about refractive index matching, making sure all components of the cells within a tissue have similar refractive indexes so that light can pass through without scattering. There are 3 methods to achieve tissue clearing:
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Protein hyper-hydration: TDE, Scale, SeeDB, CUBIC, Fruit, ClearT, FocusClear
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Solvent high refractive index matching: Visikol, HISTO technology, BABB, i/3/u/vDISCO
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Hydrogel embedding, remove lipids to provide clarity: CLARITY, PACT, PARS, SWITCH
Abcam provides a comprehensive series of 4 videos that go over the considerations when starting to use tissue clearing techniques
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Introduction to different methods for tissue clearing – pros and cons
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Optimizing tissue thickness and antibody concentration
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Considerations for direct and indirect labeling, auto-fluorescence, and multi-color labeling
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Imaging considerations, modality, objective, and refractive index matching.
A review by Ueda, H.R., 2020 provides a table of reagents used as well as imaging modality considerations.