Optical tissue clearing improves usability of optical coherence tomography (OCT) for high-throughput analysis of the internal structure and 3D morphology of small biological objects such as vertebrate embryos

Developmental biology studies frequently require rapid analysis of the morphology of a large number of embryos (highthroughput analysis). Conventional microscopic analysis is time-consuming and, therefore, is not well suited for highthroughput analysis. OCT facilitates rapid generation of optical sections through small biological objects at high resolutions. However, due to light scattering within biological tissues, the quality of OCT images drops significantly with increasing penetration depth of the light beam. We show that optical clearing of fixed embryonic organs with methyl benzoate can significantly reduce the light scattering and, thereby, improves the usability of OCT for high-throughput analysis of embryonic morphology.