Photostimulation is notable for its temporal precision, which may be used to obtain an accurate starting time of activation of caged effectors. In conjunction with caged inhibitors, the role of biomolecules at specific timepoints in an organism's lifecycle may be studied.  A caged inhibitor of N-ethylmaleimide sensitive fusion protein (NSF), a key mediator of synaptic transmission, has been used to study the time dependency of NSF.  Several other studies have effected action potential firing through use of caged neurotransmitters such as glutamate. Caged neurotransmitters, including photolable precursors of glutamate, dopamine, serotonin, and GABA, are commercially available.
Signaling during mitosis has been studied using reporter molecules with a caged fluorophore, which is not phosphorylated if photolysis has not occurred. The advantage of this technique is that it provides a “snapshot” of kinase activity at specific timepoints rather than recording all activity since the reporter's introduction.
Calcium ions play an important signaling role, and controlling their release with caged channels has been extensively studied.
Unfortunately, not all organisms produce or hold sufficient amounts of opsins. Thus, the opsin gene must be introduced to target neurons if they are not already present in the organism of study. The addition and expression of this gene is sufficient for the use of optogenetics. Possible means of achieving this include the construction of transgenic lines containing the gene or acute gene transfer to a specific area or region within an individual. These methods are known as germline transgenesis and somatic gene delivery, respectively.
Optogenetics has shown significant promise in the treatment of a series of neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease and epilepsy. Optogenetics has the potential to facilitate the manipulation and targeting of specific cell types or neural circuits, characteristics that are lacking in current brain stimulation techniques like DBS. At this point, the use of optogenetics in treating neural diseases has only been practically implemented in the field of neurobiology to reveal more about the mechanisms of specific disorders. Before the technique can be implemented to directly treat these disorders developments in other related fields such as gene therapy, opsin engineering, and optoelectronics must also make certain developments.