Georg Nagel

Georg Nagel (born August 24, 1953, Weingarten, Germany) is a German biophysicist known for his contributions to discoveries relating to light-sensitive proteins. His work helped provide a basis for optogenetics, which combines optics and genetics in technologies designed to control events in cells of living animal tissues. For his discoveries, Nagel was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, shared with American psychiatrist and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth and German biochemist and biophysicist Peter Hegemann.

Nagel was interested in science from an early age. In his youth, unable to join his siblings on skiing trips because of bone inflammation, he spent his time building things from science kits. Particularly interested in biology, he studied both biology and biophysics at the University of Konstanz. There he worked with German physicist Ernst Bamberg, focusing on gramicidin ion channels. Nagel briefly worked as a private-school teacher before moving to Frankfurt to continue working with Bamberg at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt in 1988. Nagel went to the United States for postdoctoral studies at Yale University and then Rockefeller University. In 1992 he returned to the Max Planck Institute, becoming a researcher in Bamberg’s laboratory.

In 1995 Nagel and Bamberg showed that bacteriorhodopsin, a pigmented protein found in certain bacteria that uses light energy to move protons out of cells, retained its function after being inserted into frog egg cells. It was further determined that microbial rhodopsins could be expressed in other cell types. In collaboration with Hegemann in the early 2000s, Nagel helped identify proteins known as channelrhodopsins, light-sensitive ion channels that allow for rapid responses to light in certain microorganisms. His investigations of channelrhodopsin-2 identified the protein as a directly light-gated channel, combining light detection and ion transport into one protein encoded by a single gene. These findings turned out to be especially important. When introduced into another cell, the gene produces a protein that inserts into the cell membrane. In response to certain light wavelengths, the channel opens, permitting cations (positively charged ions) to flow inward, thereby rapidly shifting the cell’s electrical voltage. Nagel’s work demonstrated that channelrhodopsin-2 can be leveraged via its activation to control cellular activity.

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In 2004 Nagel moved to the University of Würzburg, where he accepted a post as professor of molecular plant physiology. There he continued his investigations of optogenetics, developing applications specifically to better understand light signaling in plants. In 2021 he became a senior professor at the University of Würzburg’s Institute of Physiology.