Editorial: Cardiac optogenetics: Using light to observe and excite the heart

Abstract

Editorial on the Research Topic Cardiac optogenetics: Using light to observe and excite the heart This is the editorial to the special edition "Cardiac optogenetics: using light to observe and excite the heart.The application of fluorescent voltage sensitive dyes to study excitable cells was established 50 years ago (Tasaki et al., 1969) but only recently has chemical and imaging technology developed sufficiently for its mainstream use. In contrast, the field of cardiac optogenetics was established only a decade ago by publications demonstrating lightmediated excitation of the heart in mice (Bruegmann et al., 2010), zebrafish (Arrenberg et al., 2010 and cardiomyocytes in vitro (Abilez et al., 2011;Jia et al., 2011). Ever since, the subject of optogenetics has expanded to encompass a number of different applications. Early translational approaches considered light-mediated cardiac resynchronization

The Role of TRPM4 in Cardiac Electrophysiology and Arrhythmogenesis

“…In this regard, there are several challenging but promising directions. For example, transgenic animal models can be more avidly combined with optogenetic approaches to deepen our tissue-level knowledge, in vivo or ex vivo [72,73]. The single nuclei RNA sequencing can be utilized to acquire more direct information about the geometrical heterogeneity of TRPM4 and the other arrhythmic substrates across the whole heart tissue [74], in which, appropriate heterocellular cardiac organoid models could be fabricated to disentangle the tissue-level complexity in more depth [75].…”