Male mice fed a high-fat diet showed altered branching in the nerves supplying their whiskers. Researchers found the change with MouseMapper, an AI system for analysing images of entire cleared mouse bodies, in a Nature paper published on 20 May.[1]
Making a body transparent
Getting this view starts with the specimen. The vDISCO protocol, published in 2023, prepares chemically preserved tissue by removing sources of opacity, including lipids and blood pigments. It also makes the refractive index more uniform through the tissue, reducing the scattering that obstructs a microscope’s view into an intact body.[2]
Clearing can weaken fluorescent signals. vDISCO uses small antibody fragments, called nanobodies, to bind fluorescent reporter proteins and reinforce their signal with a bright dye. Pressure-driven circulation helps the labels penetrate a whole mouse. The prepared specimen can then be imaged with light-sheet microscopy, preserving the spatial relationships between labelled structures across the body without reconstructing them from physical slices.[2]
From nerve paths to whisker responses
The diet experiment lasted 16–18 weeks. The software separated nerve structures from surrounding tissue, then converted their paths into graphs of branches and connections. In infraorbital nerves, the number of graph endpoints was 60.7% lower in the high-fat-diet group: six nerves from three chow-fed mice were compared with five nerves from three high-fat-diet mice.[1]
The nerve’s maximum thickness was similar between groups. The conspicuous difference lay in its branching structure.[1]
A separate test supplied a functional clue: seven chow-fed mice and six high-fat-diet mice received whisker stimulation, with responses scored by a blinded evaluator. The latter group responded less. Together, the experiments associate altered anatomy with sensory impairment; they do not isolate nerve branching as its cause.[1]
Sources & further reading
- A deep-learning framework reveals whole-body perturbations at cell level Kaltenecker and colleagues / Nature · 20 May 2026 · Accessed 20 Oct 2026
- Whole-mouse clearing and imaging at the cellular level with vDISCO Cai and colleagues / Nature Protocols · 25 Jan 2023 · Accessed 20 Oct 2026