Seeing through Musculoskeletal Tissues: Improving In Situ Imaging of Bone and the Lacunar Canalicular System through Optical Clearing.

ABSTRACT: In situ, cells of the musculoskeletal system reside within complex and often interconnected 3-D environments. Key to better understanding how 3-D tissue and cellular environments regulate musculoskeletal physiology, homeostasis, and health is the use of robust methodologies for directly visualizing cell-cell and cell-matrix architecture in situ. However, the use of standard optical imaging techniques is often of limited utility in deep imaging of intact musculoskeletal tissues due to the highly scattering nature of biological tissues. Drawing inspiration from recent developments in the deep-tissue imaging field, we describe the application of immersion based optical clearing techniques, which utilize the principle of refractive index (RI) matching between the clearing/mounting media and ti

SUBMITTER: Berke IM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4773178 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature