Conference Support: Optogenetic Tools in Neuroscience

Statement of objectives: Our goal in this meeting is to review the progress in what is arguably the most exciting field of neuroscience: Optogenetics. This term describes the molecular methods that have been developed to activate or inactivate neurons with light. Since Francis Crick propose the idea of stimulating neurons with light in 1999, there has been a flurry of work, jumpstarted by Nagel et al in 2002, that has resulted in a palette of molecular probes that can be selective used to depolarize or hyperpolarize neurons. This type of methods became extremely popular after the Boyden et al. 2005 study using cultured neurons, widely regarded as a breakthrough since it enabled to perform these experiments with accessible and standard laboratory equipment. In the last 14 years, optogenetics has spread out through neuroscience, to the point that is now relatively standard to alter the behavior of animals using these optical tools. At the same time, the molecular design of novel optogenetics probes is far from over, and there is an increasing number of laboratories that are competing to build probes that are more effective, have a wider color spectra and can be used with more advanced forms of microscopy, such as two or three-photon excitation. Finally, optogenetics could be applied to human subjects and be used for the effective treatment of neurological or mental disorders, such as the ones suffered by tens of thousands of veterans today. For these reasons, one could argue that the future of optogenetics will be even more important than its exciting present. Methods to be employed: We propose a high caliber international meeting that will include the worlds expert in optogenetics, including all the pioneers, to examine the key questions and challenges of this field while at the same time paying close attention to the development of new methods and experimental tools. Significance of the proposed activity to the advancement of knowledge or education: This meeting could serve to review and launch new directions of research in this critical area of neuroscience, and push through the experimental challenges to arrive at a first understanding of how neural circuits compute. We expect that this meeting will have a major impact in neuroscience, neurology and psychiatry and also potentially in computer science and machine intelligence.