Preserving extracellular space for high-quality optical and ultrastructural studies of whole mammalian brains

Abstract

Analysis of brain structure, connectivity, and molecular diversity relies on effective tissue fixation. Conventional tissue fixation causes extracellular space (ECS) loss, complicating the segmentation of cellular objects from electron microscopy datasets. Previous techniques for preserving ECS in mammalian brains utilizing high-pressure perfusion can give inconsistent results owing to variations in the hydrostatic pressure within the vasculature. A more reliable fixation protocol that uniformly preserves the ECS throughout whole brains would greatly benefit a wide range of neuroscience studies. Here, we report a straightforward transcardial perfusion strategy that preserves ECS throughout the whole rodent brain. No special setup is needed besides sequential solution changes, and the protocol offers excellent reproducibility. In addition to better capturing tissue ultrastructure, preservation of ECS has many downstream advantages such as accelerating heavy-metal staining for electron microscopy, improving detergent-free immunohistochemistry for correlated light and electron microscopy, and facilitating lipid removal for tissue clearing.