Curr Opin Pharmacol 2022 Jun 21;65:102259. Epub 2022 Jun 21.
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA; Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA; MBIB Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA. Electronic address:
Blinding diseases that are caused by degeneration of rod and cone photoreceptor cells often spare the rest of the retinal circuit, from bipolar cells, which are directly innervated by photoreceptor cells, to the output ganglion cells that project axons to the brain. A strategy for restoring vision is to introduce light sensitivity to the surviving cells of the retina. One approach is optogenetics, in which surviving cells are virally transfected with a gene encoding a signaling protein that becomes sensitive to light by binding to the biologically available chromophore retinal, the same chromophore that is used by the opsin photo-detectors of rods and cones. Read More