We report advances and complementary results concerning a recently developed method for high-sensitivity grating-based x-ray phase-contrast tomography. In particular we demonstrate how the soft tissue sensitivity of the technique can be used to obtain in-vitro tomographic images of rat brain specimens. Contrary to our previous experiments with fixated specimen (chemically modified or formalin fixed), the present results on the rat's brain are closer to the in-vivo situation. The findings are particularly important from a clinical point of view, since a similar approach using three gratings can be implemented with more readily available x-ray sources, such as standard x-ray tubes. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd.