Cell Type-Specific Optogenetic Dissection of Brain Rhythms.

A pair of 2009 papers by Cardin et al. and Sohal et al. marked a watershed moment as optogenetics exploded onto the scene of systems neuroscience. This pair of back-to-back papers in the June issue of Nature leveraged a powerful combination of the Cre/lox system, adeno-associated viral gene vectors, and optogenetics to re-examine the circuit basis of neuronal synchronization.