Technology QLS
- Optical Clearing
Biological tissues are naturally opaque due to light scattering and absorption caused by refractive-index mismatches between lipids, proteins, and water.
Optical clearing chemically modifies or removes these scattering components, making tissues transparent while preserving 3D structure.
Key Benefits
- Enables deep, volumetric imaging
- Preserves cellular and subcellular architecture
- Compatible with fluorescent proteins and antibody labeling
- Eliminates the need for mechanical sectioning
Our QLS-Clear is a fully automated optical clearing system for large biological tissues that can work with a wide variety of clearing methods and types of tissues, in single or batch mode.
Decalcification and Bleaching
Decalcification removes mineralized components, primarily calcium salts, which are highly light-scattering and optically opaque. By eliminating these rigid, high-refractive-index structures, decalcification improves tissue permeability, reduces scattering, and enables uniform penetration of clearing reagents and antibodies—especially important for organs containing bone or calcified regions
Bleaching, typically performed using hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂), reduces strong endogenous pigments such as hemoglobin-derived blood residues and other chromophores. These pigments cause light absorption rather than scattering and severely limit imaging depth. Bleaching lowers optical absorption, improves fluorescence signal-to-background ratio, and accelerates subsequent lipid removal and refractive index matching.
Our QLS-Clear enables fully automated decalcification and bleaching steps during the optical clearing of the sample
Immunostaining for Large Tissues
One of the key steps for 3D imaging of large biological tissues is immunostaining. Immunostaining thick samples is traditionally slow, manual, and error prone. An Immunostaining process (primary antibody step followed by a secondary antibody step) between the lipid removal step and the refractive index matching steps, shows the best results.
Our QLS-Clear enables fully automated, deep antibody penetration, even in whole organs, with zero antibody loss. Only the necessary antibody solution quantity is used (enough to cover the whole sample).
