... . In it he describes the work of Peter Hegemann, a biologist who studied the green algae in the 1990's that led to the discovery of the light-gated ion channel, channelrhodopsin. As Chorost describes it, Under a microscope, the cell looks like a little football with a tail. When the organism is exposed to light, its tail wags madly, moving the cell forward.... This was good, solid cell ...

... ; on other occasions in metazoan evolution, a possibility that will now need to be investigated. Temporal Control of Immediate Early Gene Induction by Light: The light-gated cation channel channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) is a powerful tool for the optical induction of action potentials in neurons. Mutations of the cysteine 128 (C128) residue have been shown to greatly extend the lifetime of the ...