Congratulations to Ali Fakhrolmobasheri and SSNMR group alum Dr. Pushpa Rampratap for the publication of our collaborative paper On the Molecular Basis of Shrinkage in Hydrophobic Tissue Clearing. This is a project we started a few years back, as part of the PhD research of Pushpa Rampratap in our lab. She used MAS NMR to study the effects of chemical treatments on tissue biopsies, during the process of ‘clearing’ – a procedure for making tissues transparent to enable fluorescent/optical imaging. This involves removal of lipids and changes to the normal solvent composition, to achieve refractive index matching. Our findings were not quite what we expected, but are surely interesting. It was especially nice to see how different types of MAS NMR measurements enabled key insights into removal of lipids, changes in protein hydration, and also modifications of protein dynamics. As always, much more work remains to answer outstanding questions…
But for now, read all the details in the publication in the ACS journal Chemical & Biomedical Imaging:
Fakhrolmobasheri et al (2026) On the Molecular Basis of Shrinkage in Hydrophobic Tissue Clearing. Chemical & Biomedical Imaging, in press [DOI]