Now Japanese researchers too find way to make mice transparent for science

Invisibility may still be the stuff of fiction, but researchers in Japan have developed a method by which they can make mice almost totally transparent.

Using a method that almost completely removes colour from tissue, and kills the mouse in the process, researchers say they can now examine individual organs or even whole bodies without slicing into them, offering a "bigger picture" view of the problems they are working on.

The techniques will give scientists a "new understanding of the structure of organs and how certain genes are expressed in various tissues," said Kazuki Tainaka, the lead author of a research paper published in the United States-based journal Cell.

"We were very surprised that the entire body of infant and adult mice could be made nearly transparent," he said in a statement issued by Japanese research institute Riken and its collaborators.

The work mirrors similar research published three months ago in Cell by researchers at the California Institute of Technology, who said they were the first to make an entire mouse transparent.

The Japanese research, which also involved the University of Tokyo and the Japan Science and Technology Agency, focuses on a compound called haem, the constituent that gives blood its red colour and is found in most tissue of the body.