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Every time you changed station on an old analogue radio you had to fiddle with the dial until the signal came through clearly. There’s a similar ritual with cleared tissue – biological material made transparent by removing fats that scatter light, then soaking it in a liquid that helps light pass through the remaining tissue more evenly. Different clearing techniques require different microscope setups to view the outputs. Now a team has developed a setup that works across the whole range of current clearing techniques, with a rotatable mount to adapt to any clearing configuration. This avoids complex recalibration to view samples from different sources, enabling researchers to examine microscopic changes related to healthy processes or disease development in their full 3D anatomical context, across whole organs or tissue sections, such as the mouse organs and human/chimpanzee organoids pictured.

High-res images available here

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Images from work by Jacob R. Lamb and colleagues
• MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK
• Images originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in bioRxiv, June 2026 (preprint, not peer reviewed)