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Optogenetics is a biological technique to control the activity of neurons or other cell types with light. This is achieved by expression of light-sensitive ion channels, pumps or enzymes specifically in the target cells. On the level of individual cells, light-activated enzymes and transcription factors allow precise control of biochemical signaling pathways. In systems neuroscience, the ability to control the activity of a genetically defined set of neurons has been used to understand their contribution to decision making, learning, fear memory, mating, addiction, feeding, and locomotion. In a first medical application of optogenetic technology, vision was partially restored in a blind patient with Retinitis pigmentosa. Optogenetic techniques have also been introduced to map the functional connectivity of the brain. By altering the activity of genetically labelled neurons with light and by using imaging and electrophysiology techniques to record the activity of other cells, researchers can identify the statistical dependencies between cells and brain regions. In a broader sense, the field of optogenetics also includes methods to record cellular activity with genetically encoded indicators. In 2010, optogenetics was chosen as the "Method of the Year" across all fields of science and engineering by the interdisciplinary research journal Nature Methods. In the same year an article on "Breakthroughs of the Decade" in the academic research journal Science highlighted optogenetics. History In 1979, Francis Crick suggested that controlling all cells of one type in the brain, while leaving the others more or less unaltered, is a real challenge for neuroscience. Crick speculated that a technology using light might be useful to control neuronal activity with temporal and spatial precision but at the time there was no technique to make neurons responsive to light. By the early 1990s LC Katz and E Callaway had shown that light could uncage glutamate. Heberle and Büldt in 1994 had already shown functional heterologous expression of a bacteriorhodopsin for light-activated ion flow in yeast. In 1995, Georg Nagel et al. and Ernst Bamberg tried the heterologous expression of microbial rhodopsins (also bacteriorhodopsin and also in a non-neural system, Xenopus oocytes) (Georg Nagel et al., 1995, FEBS Lett.) and showed light-induced current. The earliest genetically targeted method that used light to control rhodopsin-sensitized neurons was reported in January 2002, by Boris Zemelman and Gero Miesenböck, who employed Drosophila rhodopsin cultured mammalian neurons. In 2003, Zemelman and Miesenböck developed a second method for light-dependent activation of neurons in which single ionotropic channels TRPV1, TRPM8 and P2X2 were gated by photocaged ligands in response to light. Beginning in 2004, the Kramer and Isacoff groups developed organic photoswitches or "reversibly caged" compounds in collaboration with the Trauner group that could interact with genetically introduced ion channels. TRPV1 methodology, albeit without the illumination trigger, was subsequently used by several laboratories to alter feeding, locomotion and behavioral resilience in laboratory animals. However, light-based approaches for altering neuronal activity were not applied outside the original laboratories, likely because the easier to employ channelrhodopsin was cloned soon thereafter. Peter Hegemann, studying the light response of green algae at the University of Regensburg, had discovered photocurrents that were too fast to be explained by the classic g-protein-coupled animal rhodopsins. Teaming up with the electrophysiologist Georg Nagel at the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt, they could demonstrate that a single gene from the alga Chlamydomonas produced large photocurrents when expressed in the oocyte of a frog. To identify expressing cells, they replaced the cytoplasmic tail of the algal protein with a fluorescent protein YFP, generating the first generally applicable optogenetic tool. They stated in the 2003 paper that "expression of ChR2 in oocytes or mammalian cells may be used as a powerful tool to increase cytoplasmic Ca2+ concentration or to depolarize the cell membrane, simply by illumination". Karl Deisseroth in the Bioengineering Department at Stanford published the notebook pages from early July 2004 of his initial experiment showing light activation of neurons expressing a channelrhodopsin. In August 2005, his laboratory staff, including graduate students Ed Boyden and Feng Zhang, in collaboration with Georg Nagel, published the first demonstration of a single-component optogenetic system, in neurons using the channelrhodopsin-2(H134R)-eYFP mutant from Georg Nagel, which is the first mutant of channelrhodopsin-2 since its functional characterization by Georg Nagel and Hegemann. Zhuo-Hua Pan of Wayne State University, researching on restore sight to blindness, tried channelrhodopsin out in ganglion cells—the neurons in human eyes that connect directly to the brain. Pan's first observation of optical activation of retinal neurons with channelrhodopsin was in February 2004 according to Pan, five months before Deisseroth's initial observation in July 2004. Indeed, the transfected neurons became electrically active in response to light, and in 2005 Zhuo-Hua Pan reported successful in-vivo transfection of channelrhodopsin in retinal ganglion cells of mice, and electrical responses to photostimulation in retinal slice culture. This approach was eventually realized in a human patient by Botond Roska and coworkers in 2021. In April 2005, Susana Lima and Miesenböck reported the first use of genetically targeted P2X2 photostimulation to control the behaviour of an animal. They showed that photostimulation of genetically circumscribed groups of neurons, such as those of the dopaminergic system, elicited characteristic behavioural changes in fruit flies. In October 2005, Lynn Landmesser and Stefan Herlitze also published the use of channelrohodpsin-2 to control neuronal activity in cultured hippocampal neurons and chicken spinal cord circuits in intact developing embryos. In addition, they introduced for the first time vertebrate rhodopsin, a light-activated G protein coupled receptor, as a tool to inhibit neuronal activity via the recruitment of intracellular signaling pathways also in hippocampal neurons and the intact developing chicken embryo. The groups of Alexander Gottschalk and Georg Nagel made the first ChR2 mutant (H134R) and were first to use channelrhodopsin-2 for controlling neuronal activity in an intact animal, showing that motor patterns in the roundworm C. elegans could be evoked by light stimulation of genetically selected neural circuits (published in December 2005). In mice, controlled expression of optogenetic tools is often achieved with cell-type-specific Cre/loxP methods developed for neuroscience by Joe Z. Tsien back in the 1990s to activate or inhibit specific brain regions and .... Discover the Kristen Feola popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Kristen Feola books.