摘要： Microscopy became a scienti?c investigation method in the seventeenth century with the application of the ?rst build microscopes on biological samples [1, 2]. Soon it became a popular method to stain samples in order to visualise particular (cellular and subcellular) structures [3]. These stains, either based on absorption or ?uorescence, have limitations in respect to their speci?city and are often toxic to cells, which limits investigations to short intervals or even dead samples. In 1987 the idea came up to use a ?uorescent protein that was discovered 25 years before [4], in particular a green ?uorescent protein (GFP) form the medusa Aequorea victoria to label cells and cellular structures [5]. With the sequencing and cloning of GFP, a so-called ‘green revolution’ started, which led to regular usage of ?uorescent proteins as markers or sensors (for details see below) in the majority of cellular research in physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, molecular biology, anatomy, cell biology, biophysics and many other biomedical ?elds. Although the expression of the ?uorescent proteins and their optical investigation can already be regarded as optogenetic tools, this term was only applied when the optical properties of proteins were used to manipulate cells. The best-known example of such a protein is the channelrhodopsin, a light-gated ion channel [6, 7]. When this ion channel is expressed in a membrane and illuminated with light of the appropriate wavelength, the channel will be activated and opened, which results in passive transportation of ions across the membrane and a change of the membrane potential. However, within this chapter we consider both aspects, the observation and the manipulation as optogenetic tools. To use the optogenetic tool, the genes of these proteins need to be transferred into the cells to allow the expression of the protein. For an overview of gene delivery into target cells, see [8].