Behold a mouse's nervous system, fluorescing through its completely see-through body, Ali Ertuerk at the Ludwlg Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and his team have worked out how to make rodents transparent and shrink them by two-thirds, so that the whole animal can be viewed under a microscope and subjected to detailed laser scanning. The team used the technique on mice genetically engineered to make their nerve cells glow green, revealing the mouse's entire nervous system in unprecedented detail (Nature Methods, DOI: 10.1038/ nmeth.3964). "You can track individual cells several centimetres long that reach from the brain right through to the tip of the spinal ford," says Ertuerk.
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