MPIDS Colloquium: Vegetative Optogenetics: Explore muscle physiology with light and enlighten new treatment options for patients

Optogenetics is a new method enabling the stimulation of cells expressing light-inducible channels, receptors and proteins with light. This new techniques allows thus to investigate skeletal, smooth and cardiac muscle physiology with unforeseen spatial and temporal precision as well as cell-specificity. In addition, cell-specific stimulation allows pain-free and harmless pacemaking and ter-mination of cardiac arrhythmia as well as restoring laryngeal functions with high precision. There-fore this talk will built a bridge between basic research addressing muscular (patho-)physiology with new stimulation paradigms and completely new translational prospects, both enabled by a fascinat-ing new technique.