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Brief Communication

Nature Methods 5, 609–612 (1 July 2008) | doi:10.1038/nmeth.1219

In vitro whole-organ imaging: 4D quantification of growing mouse limb buds

Marit J Boot , C Henrik Westerberg , Juanjo Sanz-Ezquerro , James Cotterell , Ronen Schweitzer , Miguel Torres & James Sharpe

Quantitative mapping of the normal tissue dynamics of an entire developing mammalian organ has not been achieved so far but is essential to understand developmental processes and to provide quantitative data for computational modeling. We developed a four-dimensional (4D) imaging technique that can be used to quantitatively image tissue movements and dynamic GFP expression domains in a growing transgenic mouse limb by time-lapse optical projection tomography (OPT).