2023-10-28 17:31:00
This technical feat, carried out on organs from deceased donors, will allow scientists around the world to better study eye diseases and their mechanisms.
It took seven years of work for a team of Franco-Swiss researchers to achieve a world first: the transparency (making transparent) of an entire human eye.
This feat has just been published in the journal Communications Biology. It was carried out jointly by Marie Darche, a research engineer and member of Professor Michel Paques’ team at the Quinze-Vingts hospital and the Vision Institute (Paris), and researchers from the institute Wyss, in Geneva.
The Swiss took care of the imaging side of the project using a special optical device, a light sheet microscope (MesoSPIM). The biologist took charge of “clearing”, that is to say the steps allowing an initially opaque biological sample to be transformed into a transparent structure.
Organic baths and fluorescent markers
To do this, she proceeded through a succession of baths in organic solvents associated with marking with fluorescent antibodies, explains the magazine Sciences et Avenir. All on organs from dead American donors, French legislation not allowing this specific type of donation.
“At the same time too fragile, too solid and too pigmented, the eye is in fact the most resistant organ in the body and it is real hell to work with!”, confided the researcher to our colleagues. It was therefore necessary to increase discussions with specialists to overcome the resistance of this body to different types of “clearing” techniques.
Working on glaucoma and myopia
Because if other teams had succeeded in the past in clarifying certain segments of the eye, this is the first time that an entire eye has been transpared. Marie Darche indicates that she will extend her research on eyeballs affected by AMD (age-related macular degeneration, editor’s note), glaucoma and high myopia, which will allow a better approach to these pathologies.
The team has already planned to share its images as open source with the entire scientific community and is considering the acquisition of its own light sheet microscope within the Quinze-Vingts hospital, further indicates Sciences et futur .
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