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Theodore is a rising senior at the University of Texas at San Antonio majoring in biomedical engineering with a minor in neuroscience. He is a RISE scholar, has served as a peer mentor with the CIMA-LSAMP program at the Alamo Colleges in San Antonio, and remains dedicated to encouraging community college students to engage in research.

Imaging intact, millimeter-scale tissue slices at cellular resolution requires effective clearing and labeling protocols that preserve morphology and enable deep stain penetration. This summer at BSRP has been transformative. Not only did I deepen my scientific skills and explore new areas of research, but I also found a community of passionate, supportive peers and mentors who’ve helped me grow in ways I never expected. It reaffirmed my commitment to pursuing a career in research that bridges engineering and medicine.While most protocols are designed for formalin-fixed tissue samples from archival patient tissues or animal models, we are developing a strategy tailored to organotypic slice cultures that were previously maintained in vitro, preserving relevant aspects of tissue architecture and microenvironmental context. In this project, we are developing a protocol combining paraformaldehyde (PFA) fixation, ethyl cinnamate (ECi) based optical clearing, and immunolabeling adapted from the iDISCO method to visualize immune cells within fixed murine spleen slice cultures. These spleen samples provide a proof-of-concept model due to their high abundance of immune cells, which are the key targets we ultimately aim to track in tumor slice cultures in the future. Our goal is to demonstrate that ECi clearing is compatible with whole-mount antibody staining for immune markers in thick tissue slices, enabling high-resolution, non-destructive volumetric imaging using confocal microscopy. Establishing this workflow will validate a generalizable approach for immune cell labeling in complex tissues and provide a foundation for future studies in tumor slice cultures and other biologically relevant models.

Project: Optimizing Tissue Clearing and Labeling for Imaging of Slice Culture

Mentor: Kevin Bishop, Blainey Lab