New 3D depigmentation technique enables high-res imaging of intact organisms | Hacker News Reader

New 3D depigmentation technique enables high-res imaging of intact organisms

advances.sciencemag.org

38 pointsbookofjoe7 comments

It should be considered malpractice to publish an article about a new technique and not include a detailed protocol for how to do it. It’s understandable if the article is trying to show some effect, develops the new technique as a means to that end, and then publishes the result they found, but in cases where the article is “we can now do this in whatever organism we want”, not telling people how they can do it themselves holds science back.

It's in the supplemental materials (note I am not in this field, so I may have missed something): https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2020/05/21/6.2...

Most journals certainly have a separate Methods section where they describe the entire protocol. I believe this paper has the same section too. Can you be more specific what you think authors missed out in description of the methods?

I can imagine that for the sake of being concise (big Journals have text limits), they might have moved details to Supplementary sections.

Another reason one might find methods to be incomplete is when they refer to a previous paper and build on top of that, which is not entirely a bad strategy because this allows readers to go back to previous method in its original version than reading a duplicate version in new paper.

I’m looking for a detailed checklist that a reasonably well trained scientist in the field could follow. This should include equipment they used, and guidance on where variables should be adjusted for sample size.

See https://www.protocols.io/view/human-colon-tissue-clearing-an... and compare to the amount of detail even in the supplemental methods.

Again, I think the concision and “refer to previous methods” approach is mostly* fine for discovery papers, but if the method is the thing, I want all the gory details in one place.

* but also, academics hate chasing down chains of references, some of which are in journals their university doesn’t subscribe to.

Methods follow Discussion in this article. First time I've seen that and I've been reading scientific papers since 1970, when I started med school.

It's a shame that their downloadable "high res" images are so small. One of them is 250KB (0.4 megapixels), the same size as the one directly viewable on the site. Maybe that's a mistake.

I clicked on the image directly viewable on the site:

F1.medium.gif 314x440

it downloaded to

F1.large.jpg 1050x1470

I'm using Chrome FWIW

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