Figure 1.

Calcium imaging in disease modeling and drug discovery. Different modalities (top panels) provide access to different units of analysis (circles), with calcium imaging bridging the cell, population, and animal levels. Numerous tools exist (arrows) to generate disease models of varying complexity, each of which has utility in drug discovery efforts (middle panel) that can be revealed using calcium imaging. Leveraging these platforms, to understand the mechanisms by which disease-related genes bring about clinical symptoms, can underpin a pathophysiology-based approach to drug design (bottom panel), which may be the key to discovering new therapeutics for patients with psychiatric disorders.