UbasM: a simple, rapid, efficient balanced optical clearing method for brain imaging

Optical clearing methods are highly in demand in organism-level biomedical system research since they can facilitate deep optical imaging by reducing light scattering in tissue and then enable three-dimensional signal visualization and quantification of tissues. While the previously reported optical clearing methods have addressed some of six key issues (i.e. transparency, efficiency, reproducibility, preservation of emission from fluorescence proteins, preservation of membrane integrity, and the ease of operation), none has yet addressed all of them. Here, we present a new, convenient, inexpensive and reproducible approach to optical clearing, termed UbasM, providing unprecedented performance in terms of clearing rate, the ease of operation and satisfactory fluorescence protein/membrane integrity preservation while achieving sufficient transparency to permit 3D volumetric imaging.