title: Illuminating circuitry relevant to psychiatric disorders with optogenetics.
abstract: The brain's remarkable capacity to generate cognition and behavior is mediated by an extraordinarily complex set of neural interactions that remain largely mysterious. This complexity poses a significant challenge in developing therapeutic interventions to ameliorate psychiatric disease. Accordingly, few new classes of drugs have been made available for patients with mental illness since the 1950s. Optogenetics offers the ability to selectively manipulate individual neural circuit elements that underlie disease-relevant behaviors and is currently accelerating the pace of preclinical research into neurobiological mechanisms of disease. In this review, we highlight recent findings from studies that employ optogenetic approaches to gain insight into normal and aberrant brain function relevant to mental illness. Emerging data from these efforts offers an exquisitely detailed picture of disease-relevant neural circuits in action, and hints at the potential of optogenetics to open up entirely new avenues in the treatment of psychiatric disorders.
authors.affiliation: Nancy Pritzker Laboratory, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5453, USA; Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5453, USA.
authors.forename: Elizabeth E
authors.initials: EE
authors.lastname: Steinberg
authors.affiliation: Nancy Pritzker Laboratory, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5453, USA; Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5453, USA.
authors.forename: Daniel J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Christoffel
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5453, USA; Dept. of Bioengineering, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5453, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5453, USA.
authors.forename: Karl
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Deisseroth
authors.affiliation: Nancy Pritzker Laboratory, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5453, USA; Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305-5453, USA. Electronic address: malenka@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Robert C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Malenka
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000378:metabolism / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000473:pathology*; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000473:pathology*; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000473:pathology*; D062308:Optogenetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation