Microbial Opsins: A Family of Single-Component Tools for Optical Control of Neural Activity

INTRODUCTION

Members of the microbial opsin gene family have emerged recently as crucial tools for “optogenetics,” a new neuroscience technology. “Optogenetics” can be defined as the integration of optics and genetics to control well-defined events (such as action potentials) within specified cells (such as a targeted class of projection neurons) in living tissues (such as the brains of freely behaving mammals). In this article, we focus on the diversity of the microbial opsin genes and the structure–function properties of their corresponding proteins.