Cell reports methods, Volume 3, Issue 12, 11 2 2023, Pages 100671 Opto-electronic feedback control of membrane potential for real-time control of action potentials. Ördög B, De Coster T, Dekker SO, Bart CI, Zhang J, Boink GJJ, Bax WH, Deng S, den Ouden BL, de Vries AAF, Pijnappels DA
To unlock new research possibilities by acquiring control of action potential (AP) morphologies in excitable cells, we developed an opto-electronic feedback loop-based system integrating cellular electrophysiology, real-time computing, and optogenetic approaches and applied it to monolayers of heart muscle cells. This allowed accurate restoration and preservation of cardiac AP morphologies in the presence of electrical perturbations of different origin in an unsupervised, self-regulatory manner, without any prior knowledge of the disturbance. Moreover, arbitrary AP waveforms could be enforced onto these cells. Collectively, these results set the stage for the refinement and application of opto-electronic control systems to enable in-depth investigation into the regulatory role of membrane potential in health and disease.
