Novel technologies as drivers of progress in cardiac biophysics.

The title is a red herring, of course. It points to a typical ‘chickenand-egg question’: whether progress (in biomedical research and elsewhere) is driven per se by new technologies, or vice versa. Naturally, both scenarios exist. Optical mapping of functionreporting fluorescent dyes that can be washed into tissue via the vasculature, for example, has spawned huge improvements in spatio-temporal resolution of cardiac electrophysiology observation (Herron et al., 2012). However, this has not addressed our inability to track electrophysiological properties of specific cell populations, including non-myocytes (Kohl et al., 1992), in an electrically integrated organ such as the heart (Kohl and Gourdie, 2014) e a question whose exploration required new technologies, such as genetically-encoded fluorescent reporters of cell-type specific function (Knopfel, 2012). In addition to longitudinal developments in a specific research area, there is immense potential for technological and knowledge-based progress, driven by lateral transfer of know-how between neighbouring disciplines. An example here is the emerging use of optogentic tools to alter the electrical behaviour of cardiac cells in situ (Entcheva, 2013) using approaches that were originally pioneered for neuroscience (Deisseroth et al., 2006). The focus of this issue, therefore, is better described as an illustration of the interplay of advanced technologies, clever experimental design, and insightful analysis e an interaction that often involves the combination of experimental and theoretical approaches e in a bid to advance our conceptual insight into cardiac biophysics (Quinn and Kohl, 2013). The present volume of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology is loosely associated with the 2013 International Workshop on Cardiac Mechano-Electric Feedback and Arrhythmias at Oxford. It continues a series of PBMB editions over the past 15 years linked to the same event, with the most recent previous edition dedicated to The Beating Heart (Kohl et al., 2012). We are thankful to PBMB for this opportunity, and for their support of this highly interdisciplinary field with contributions from leading investigators whose complimentary but different research foci would rarely bring them together in one research meeting or scientific journal. The present volume contains a selection of original research communications and reviews. The first paper (Quinn et al., 2014) links back to the above mentioned series of prior PBMB issues on cardiac mechanoeelectric interactions, and provides an update, whose direct comparison with a 2003 view by nearly the same authors (Kohl and Ravens, 2003) allows one to compare and contrast the state of play, and expectations, one decade apart. The next seven papers are all concerned with different facets of mechano-sensitive responses, approaching the topic from a wide