Figure 2.

Effect of optical clearing using BABB. (a) Left and right panels show a segment of a human abdominal aorta before and after optical clearing, respectively. Note the translucent appearance of the cleared vessel, also visible by the lighter shadow under the same lighting conditions. (b) Both cross-section images were obtained from optically cleared tissues and stained subsequently with picrosirius red for visualizing collagen (left; collagen appears bright red under dark-field polarized light) and Elastica Van Gieson as a general stain (right; elastic fibres and nuclei appear black, collagen stains pink, muscle and cytoplasm stains light brown/yellowish). The appearances of both images are consistent with photographs of standard formalin fixed tissue samples.