Japanese scientists have recently successfully turned mice translucent.
Hi there viewers, Julian here for DNews.
Translucent animals are more common than you probably think, in that they actually already
exist.
Most of the naturally occurring ones are found in the deep ocean.
There’s so little light that reflecting any that does reach that far down can make
them a tasty piece of deep sea horror sushi.
So a lot of deep sea critters are see-through to avoid that.
You might notice a lot of them are red or a transparent pink too, because red light’s
long wavelength means it has low energy and doesn’t penetrate water well.
Thus animals that only reflect red light are essentially invisible down there.
Isn’t science neat?
Up here there’s not much point in having transparent skin.
There’s so much light that being a gooey see-through blob of floating bones and organs
is going to be a bit more noticeable than being the same color as your surrounds, so
it doesn’t really make sense.
Of course scientists aren’t hampered by your precious “logic” and have bred a
few frogs and goldfish to have see through skin.
Researchers in Japan took the most pale ones they could find and kept breeding them together.
The goal is to be able to observe the internal organs while the animal is alive, making it
easier to keep track of tumor growth and how they react to chemicals.
This for me raises an important philosophical question.
No it’s not, “should scientists play god?”
I want to know what you call a see through goldfish.
But now there’s a way to turn the skin, brain, lungs, the whole shebang except the
bones clear.
A team at the RIKEN quantitative biology center in Osaka pulled off the trick on mice by flushing
out their circulatory systems with saline and then pumping a chemical through them for
2 weeks.
The chemical removes heme from the mice.
Heme is found in most tissue and is the “heme” part of hemoglobin, it’s the compound in
blood that binds to oxygen and also gives it its red tint.
Fun fact: your blood is always red, regardless of whether or not it has oxygen.
Remember what I said about red light not being able to penetrate well because of it’s low
energy?
That’s why your veins look blue under your skin.
Totally transparent mice make it possible to see the cellular networks inside tissue.
Hiroki Ueda, who led the team, hopes it can be used to gain a better understanding of
cancer or autoimmune diseases by being able to observe how they develop without having
to dissect the mice.
As it so often goes though, the mice don’t get off easy.
Being stripped of blood and then heme entirely is pretty much game over.
But I for one am resting easier knowing that there’s no nightmare fuel jell-o mice running
around with the chance to escape and breed and form an invisible army of horror and cheese
theft.
If you want to learn another way to turn yourself invisible while keeping all your blood in
you, Amy’s got a video on that over here.
If you’ve got a story of a time science did something awesome for lab mice, I want
to hear about it in the comments.
I’m not a vegetarian or anything, but I can only read so many stories about lab mice
before I need a pick me up.
Until then, I’ll see you next time on DNews.