Reverse and Forward Engineering Multicellular Structures with Optogenetics

Overview

Journal Curr Opin Biomed Eng

Specialty Biomedical Engineering

Date 2021 Mar 15

PMID 33718689

Citations 5

Authors

Thomas R Mumford

Lee Roth

Lukasz J Bugaj

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Understanding how cells self-organize into functional higher-order structures is of great interest, both towards deciphering animal development, as well as for our ability to predictably build custom tissues to meet research and therapeutic needs. The proper organization of cells across length-scales results from interconnected and dynamic networks of molecules and cells. Optogenetic probes provide dynamic and tunable control over molecular events within cells, and thus represent a powerful approach to both dissect and control collective cell behaviors. Here we emphasize the breadth of the optogenetic toolkit and discuss how these methods have already been used to reverse-engineer the design rules of developing organisms. We also offer our perspective on the rich potential for optogenetics to power forward-engineering of tissue assembly towards the generation of bespoke tissues with user-defined properties.

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