Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel – awarded the 2026 medicine prize – discovered a remarkable protein, channelrhodopsin, in a single-celled alga.
Hegemann wondered how Chlamydomonas, a single-celled alga, is able to swim towards a light source. In the early 2000s, he and Georg Nagel discovered channelrhodopsin, an algal protein with unique properties, found on the surface of the cell. When it is illuminated by blue light, a channel opens through the protein. Charged ions then flow into the cell, creating an electrical impulse. They found that regardless of which cell they put the protein in, those cells became light sensitive.
#NobelPrize
To understand how the brain forms memories, feelings and behaviours has long been a dream for researchers.
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel have been awarded the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries leading to optogenetics, which makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain.
This method is now being used in laboratories around the world to reveal the brain’s mysteries.
Human daytime color vision is enabled by three photoreceptor proteins called opsins that are each expressed in different cone cells in the retina.
Three studies determined structures and performed complementary modeling and biochemical experiments for human and nonhuman primate opsins, providing molecular insight into how visual pigment absorption and activation kinetics are tuned.
Learn more this week in Science: https://t.co/NOrVC45g5Y
Happy to share our work on conventional and time-resolved cryo-EM studies of NTSR1, now published in Nature!
https://t.co/SbH6IqxgxJ
Wonderful collab. w/ Sumino, Mitsutake, Kobilka, & Inoue labs.
Congrats to @AlHSJCKtEfpFXtm, @kk_kawakami, Toshiki, Shun & everyone involved!
New preprint by J.B. Peters, C. Heidebrecht et al.:
"3D-MINSTED nanoscopy and protein tracking in densely labelled living cells"
https://t.co/0IA1SB2AZ4
Kinesin-1 steps resolved amid substantial intracellular background!
@mpi_nat@mpi_mr_hd#Nanoscopy#Fluorescence