The other day my colleague Don Ready in the department forwarded an interesting news article from The New York Times that describes a very simple mountant to makes tissue samples very transparent without affecting the fluorescence signal. That substantially helps imaging thick samples. The technique, which is called Scale, is published in Nature Neuroscience.
A 3d reconstruction of neurons labeled by fluorescent protein in mouse brain treated with Scale; Provided by Atsushi Miyawaki to the New York Times
The most interesting aspect about Scale is that it is made up with cheap chemicals that one can find in the lab (urea, glycerol and triton-X 100). It was actually discovered by a random but careful observation in the lab. That makes me wonder how much we have missed every time when we follow a protocol “religiously”.