FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) - A local undergraduate student has altered an innovative biology technique developed at Stanford University to make it more cost-effective for researchers at smaller laboratories.
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports (https://bit.ly/1FvVejv ) that Stanford researchers in 2014 pioneered “CLARITY,” a lab technique that can turn normally opaque rodent brains transparent, allowing them to be studied as a whole rather than in tiny slices.
The technique, however, is prohibitively expensive for small labs like the ones at University of Alaska Fairbanks.
UAF undergraduate student Matt Vanagel worked with a chemistry professor to find an alternative to CLARITY’s expensive reagents.
His changes make the process slower and UAF microscopes require the rodent brains to be sectioned. But the modified process allows researchers to look at a large chunk of the brain at a fraction of CLARITY’s cost.
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Information from: Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner, https://www.newsminer.com
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