Patterned Photostimulation in the Brain

Photostimulation has been instrumental in the past two decades for studying the structural synaptic plasticity and functional connectivity of neuronal circuits. With the advent of optogenetic strategies, this approach has been further expanded and used to identify the neuronal substrates of behavior via monitoring and modulating the activity of specific neuronal types in vivo. To date, however, photostimulation has been mainly implemented via full-field illumination and laser scanning protocols, which suffer from limited selectivity and stop short of generating asynchronous and spatially distributed neuronal firing patterns, characteristic for brain activity