Bruker, Translucence Partner to Streamline 3D Tissue Imaging Workflows

Two companies working on opposite ends of the same problem have decided to join forces. Bruker Corporation and Translucence Biosystems announced a partnership this week designed to make it simpler for researchers to turn biological samples into high-resolution three-dimensional images they can actually analyze.

The bottleneck, until now, has been fragmentation. A researcher wanting to image an entire organ or organism in three dimensions would need to prepare the sample using one vendor's tools, image it with another company's microscope, then process the resulting data with yet another platform. Each handoff introduced friction, inconsistency, and the possibility of losing information. The new collaboration aims to eliminate those gaps by bundling the entire pipeline into a single, integrated workflow.

Translucence brings the first critical piece: a tissue-clearing kit that strips away the opacity that normally prevents light from penetrating deep into biological samples. Their Universal Tissue Clearing Kit is designed to work with antibodies that researchers choose themselves, and it requires no specialized equipment beyond what most labs already have on hand. This accessibility matters. It means a researcher doesn't need to invest in new hardware or retrain staff on proprietary systems just to prepare samples for imaging. The kit is also built to reduce the variability that typically creeps in when different labs or different technicians run the same protocol.

Bruker contributes the imaging and data infrastructure. The company's MuVi SPIM and LCS SPIM microscopes are light-sheet systems optimized specifically for cleared tissue—they can capture intricate detail from small tissue structures all the way up to entire organisms. But raw microscopy data is only useful if you can make sense of it. Bruker's software suite handles the heavy computational lifting: it registers and fuses multiple views of the same sample at high speed, stitching them into a single coherent dataset. The company's Acquifer HIVE platform then manages the resulting files—often enormous—and provides tools for visualization and further analysis.

What emerges from this combination is a workflow where each step feeds cleanly into the next. A researcher prepares a sample using Translucence's kit in their own lab. They move it to a Bruker microscope and acquire the three-dimensional images. The data flows directly into Bruker's processing pipeline, which generates analysis-ready datasets without requiring the researcher to wrangle files between incompatible systems or learn multiple software interfaces. The result, according to both companies, is faster turnaround, more consistent results, and the ability to scale the approach across different types of biological samples.

Damian Wheeler, who co-founded Translucence, framed the partnership as an expansion of accessibility. The Universal Tissue Clearing Kit was built, he said, to democratize high-quality three-dimensional histology—to make it work reliably across different sample types without requiring specialized infrastructure. Pairing that foundation with Bruker's imaging and computational capabilities extends the reach further, offering researchers a more complete and integrated solution for analyzing whole organs.

Xiaomei Li, who leads Bruker's fluorescence microscopy division, emphasized the shift in what researchers now expect. Labs increasingly want end-to-end workflows rather than point solutions. This partnership, she suggested, simplifies the path from sample to insight, improves the reproducibility of results, and lets researchers spend less time managing technical details and more time interpreting what the data actually shows. Both companies see applications across basic research and translational work—the kind of research that moves discoveries from the lab toward clinical use.

The partnership represents a broader trend in life sciences instrumentation: vendors recognizing that researchers value integration and ease of use as much as raw capability. A microscope that produces stunning images is only as valuable as the ecosystem around it. By aligning with a company that solves the sample preparation problem, Bruker is essentially saying that the future of 3D imaging belongs to whoever can make the entire journey—from tissue to insight—feel seamless.