Abstract

Organism-level systems biology aims to identify and analyze cellular circuits in organisms. To this end, one of the most powerful methods is optical imaging in combination with fluorescent labeling. However, the long-standing obstacle has been tissue opacity. Recently, the solutions to this problem have started to emerge by whole-body/organ clearing techniques that employ new tissue-clearing chemistry. In this talk, I introduce these advancements and discuss how to combine new clearing techniques with efficient production of genome-engineered animals, rapid volume imaging and efficient image informatics in order to obtain quantitative organ-wide single-cell-resolution data. These technologies start to bring us closer to system-level understanding of physiology and diseases of complex mammalian systems.

© 2017 Optical Society of America