Figure 3.

Applications of optogenetics in steering molecular activity in cells and organisms. A) A scattered plot depicting selected work of optogenetic control of molecular activities in the past three years. Strategies are grouped into three categories: cell signaling (yellow),^{[20,34,38–49,51a,52–59,61,67,69–76,79–83,66]} organelle manipulation (cyan),^{[84–87,89–100]} and genetic regulation (magenta).^{[101,102,105–107,109–118]} Excitation wavelength refers to the light used to activate the optogenetic proteins, which are individually labeled. The time to phenotype was chosen based on reported timescales outlined in Table 2. Word clouds indicating the frequency of each outcome per category: signaling B), organelle manipulation C), and genetic regulation D). The outcomes are also summarized in Table 2. The word clouds were generated in Wordcloud.com.