SALT LAKE CITY — It's a problem that has plagued scientists since they first started examining the world around them: Things aren't see-through. You just can't look at what's going on deep inside something without cutting it or taking it apart or something else. Unless you are Superman.

But science always delivers. Researchers have found a way to turn organ tissues transparent — including the brain. That has some pretty important implications for an emerging field of biology known as connectomics.

The brain is ridiculously complicated, with hundreds of billions of neurons making trillions of connections. Figuring out how all that works and mapping out those connections is the goal of connectomics.

Making the brain clear — in this case, a small mouse brain — aids that endeavor by allowing scientists to look at longer connections, rather than being limited to the short connections of microscopically thin slices of brain currently being mapped.

"You can get right down to the fine structure of the system while not losing the big picture," said Keith Deisseroth, who invented the method.

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The method is called CLARITY and basically it works like this: You treat a brain with acrylamide, a chemical which latches on to proteins and other biological molecules and sets them hard in place. Then you use a special detergent called SDS to wash off all the lipids that obscure one's view deep into an organ. Viola — transparent tissue that doesn't fall apart.

Deisseroth said the team is currently using CLARITY to clarify an entire human brain.

Understanding the connections that brains make over very long distances is incredibly important to determining how exactly the brain works. Current methods are limited to razor-thin slices of brain that have to be matched up with one another in order to show the larger 3D picture. That takes a lot of time and effort and introduces many errors.

Relative transparency allows researchers to look at slices almost a millimeter thick and see those connections between neurons over a scale many orders of magnitude larger than before.

"This is probably one of the most important advances for doing neuroanatomy in decades," Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, told the Nature magazine online.

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