Clearing skeletal muscle with CLARITY for light microscopy imaging

Viewing subcellular details over large tissue volumes is becoming an essential condition of the success of large-scale projects aimed at visualizing cell connections in whole organs or tissues. However, tissue opacity remains an obstacle to deep tissue imaging. This situation has brought renewed interest for techniques of tissue clearing; new protocols, such as CLARITY (Clear Lipid-exchanged Acrylamide-hybridized Rigid Imaging/Immunostaining/In situ hybridization-compatible Tissue-hYdrogel), have recently been developed. So far, most of the tests of these techniques have been applied to brain or other soft tissues. Here we show that CLARITY clears mouse hindlimb skeletal muscles and maintains the basic structural features of muscle and its fibers. However, tagging with fluorescent markers was not successful.