Abstract
Optogenetics as a field cuts cleanly across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Ecology and genetics provide a source of proteins; advanced spectroscopy and structural biology elucidate molecular mechanisms; molecular biology and biochemistry are used to engineer proteins; sophisticated instrumentation delivers light. An understanding of cell biology or neuroscience is needed to develop reasonable biological questions, and rigorous computation is essential to process the torrents of data that often result. The development of optically instrumented life forms promises to continue for the decades ahead.Optogenetics also illustrates the difficulty in predicting where basic science will lead. The Optopatch constructs combine genes from an archaeon from the Dead Sea, an alga from England, an FP from a coral, an FP from a jellyfish, and a peptide from a pig virus. The discoverers of these individual genes likely never suspected that they would be combined one day and used in human neurons to study a cell-based model of neurodegeneration in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
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