Cheetos Food Coloring Turns Mice Transparent
Itâs a vanishing act that Harry Houdini would envy.A popular food dye in Cheetos can turn the skin of live mice transparent to reveal the animalâs organs inside.When scientists massaged a solution of the dye tartrazine onto the bellies of live mice, their skin appeared to vanish, revealing the inner organs and pulsing muscles in the gut. After soaking the miceâs heads in the solution, they saw blood vessels that sluice the brain. Applied to the hind limbs, the dye showed muscles in the legs.Biological cells are held together by oily membrane made of fats, embedded in a watery matrix. Fat and water transmit light differently, so light scatters as it hits the cells. This is why skin is opaque. But the addition of this food dye evens out the difference between the fat and water, allowing light to pass through, rendering the skin layers transparent, the researchers said.âIt was one of those moments where you go, that is both really clever and really simple,â said Christopher Rowlands, a biophotonics researcher at Imperial College London, who reviewed the study and wrote a commentary about the findings for Science.Tartrazine, certified by the Food and Drug Administration as FD&C Yellow No. 5, is used at much lower concentrations in snacks and sodas.âI wouldnât worry about making my belly or my gut transparent by eating a bag of Doritos,â said Stanford University materials scientist Guosong Hong, who was part of the team that described the phenomenon in the journal Science in September.Researchers at Kyushu University in Japan questioned the study in a preprint posted Sunday on a scientific forum. After being contacted by The Wall Street Journal, they said they were revisiting their critique. The preprint was withdrawn Wednesday.If the dye works on human tissue, this phenomenon could one day be a useful medical tool, from a variety of imaging uses to displaying subcutaneous veins for easy blood draws, Hong said.The researchers didnât have institutional permissions to test the dye in people.Human skin is 10 times thicker than the skin of mice, according to Hong, so they donât expect the same solution they used on the mice to have as powerful a disappearing effect on people.For their next trick, the team is planning ways to test its discovery on human tissue in the lab.
