Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to three scientists for optogenetics research

The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to three scientists whose work led to optogenetics, a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works. The Nobel Assembly named Karl Deisseroth, 54, Peter Hegemann, 71, and Georg Nagel, 73, saying they had carried out research into light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. [ 1 , 2 ]

The assembly said Deisseroth is based at Stanford University in California and Hegemann at Humboldt University in Berlin. It said Nagel is at the University of Würzburg, also in Germany; ABC News described Nagel as most recently having worked at Würzburg. ABC News also reported that Deisseroth is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. [ 1 , 2 ]

Optogenetics opened what the Nobel Assembly called a new era in neuroscience: the discovery of a light-controlled switch to turn nerve cells and circuits in the brain on and off so that researchers can better learn how the brain works and begin to unravel the pathways that lead to behavior and disease. The assembly said the method is now being used in laboratories around the world. [ 1 , 2 ]

The work began when Hegemann explored how a single-celled type of green algae can swim toward light. He and Nagel discovered a protein that, when illuminated by blue light, opens a channel to create an electrical impulse; putting that protein into other cells makes them light-sensitive. Deisseroth then worked with the gene that controls that protein to create a light-controlled switch for nerve cells in the brains of living mice. [ 1 , 2 ]

The University of Pittsburgh's Jeremy Berg called optogenetics "a very precise set of tools for doing experiments about how the brain works that are pretty hard to do any other way." Berg, who was at the National Institutes of Health in the early 2000s when it awarded Deisseroth major funding, said the money went for "this vision of optogenetics that was pretty much spot-on the way it played out." [ 1 ]

Deisseroth described the approach in his own terms, according to ABC News: "People usually think about light as a way of collecting information to observe things. But this is the opposite of that. This is using light to control things, to make things happen, and to do it in a very precise way." He first developed tiny fibers to deliver light to cells modified with the light-sensitive gene, ABC News reported. [ 2 ]

Deisseroth, a self-described night owl, said he was up late at his Northern California home working on papers and emailing his students, and had just gone to lie down when he got the call from the Nobel assembly. [ 1 ]