No personal experience at all, but I have been following this topic for a while

since this paper by Zhang et al caused a stir as he violated some trust and guidelines after receiving the MagR genetic material from Can Xie:

"Magnetogenetics: remote non-invasive magnetic activation of neuronal activity with a magnetoreceptor".

Shortly after in 2016, the Xie group published their original finding in Nature Materials

A magnetic protein biocompass

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Yin%20H%5BAuthor%5D&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=26569474

However, in collaboration with Bai Lu's group, they then eventually concluded that MagR does not work in this application. I quote from their 2017 Frontiers in Neural Circuits article:

"We have been investigating whether expression of MagR could confer a neuronal response to MS. While our work was in progress, a report was published showing a robust increase in intracellular calcium in HEK 293 cells and hippocampal neurons transfected with MagR alone (in the absence of Cry), in response to weak MS (~1.0 mT) (Long et al., 2015). The audacious claim that this non-invasive approach may replace optogenetics for neural modulation has led to numerous attempts to replicate the work by researchers around the world, with no successful report thus far. In marked contrast to the published report, we could not detect any change in intracellular calcium induced by MS in cells expressing MagR alone. "

So long story short, magnetogenetics with MagR definitely seems shot down right now

IMO, the other trp channel based engineered constructs still seem to need more refining. And AFAIK neither of the two are publicly available... The first trpv1 based one may prove too clunky to work across a lot of systems and applications.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, no one has really contested the physics in Meister successfully, which has for sure dampened the enthusiasm in the field.

Keep in mind that most potential users of this technology are almost completely interested in it only as a tool to answer their research questions for already established or planned projects. We like to understand the mechanisms of the tools we use, and Meister makes a compelling case that we do not understand them here.

This means that for now at least, only labs that are willing to study magnetogenetics itself and the constructs themselves and their mechanism should be fine with using these techniques.

Until and unless someone can show a hole in Meister's reasoning, prove another mechanism or invent a new physics.

Thank you very much for your answer.

Yeah I see, Like I thought, the proposed mechanism is too weak regarding the known physical laws.

However animals with magnetoception can sense magnetic fields that are much weaker to the fields applied in both studies and in magnetoception the mechanism is also mostly unknown. So it could be that there is another mechanism, than proposed in the original papers that lead to the magnetic effects. So like you said, I am like the most researcher my primary interest is it to use it as tool and the exact mechanism is not my main concern. However it looks suspicious that no one else in the last two years at least try to use the methods in both papers from 2016, because there are a numerous possible applications, in which many research groups will be interested.

Hi Sebastian,

We have recently published a comment on the topic of magnetogenetics. Have a look here:

http://emboj.embopress.org/content/36/12/1643.long

I hope this helps!