Georg Nagel was born on August 24, 1953, in Weingarten, Germany. He is a biophysicist and a professor in the Neurophysiology Department at the University of Würzburg, Germany. His research studies microbial photoreceptors and the development of optogenetic tools.

Scientific career

Georg Nagel studied biology and biophysics at the University of Konstanz in Germany. He earned his PhD from the University of Frankfurt in 1988 while working at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt. After earning his PhD, he worked as a postdoc at Yale University and Rockefeller University in the United States. From 1992 to 2004, he led an independent research group in the Department of Biophysical Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt. Since 2004, he has been a professor at the University of Würzburg in Germany. He first worked in the Department for Molecular Plant Physiology and Biophysics, and since 2019, he has been in the Department for Neurophysiology.

Research

Georg Nagel, along with Peter Hegemann, helped discover channelrhodopsins, which started the field of optogenetics. In 1995, Georg Nagel and Ernst Bamberg showed that a microbial rhodopsin called bacteriorhodopsin, when placed in animal cells (Xenopus oocytes), works properly and makes the cells sensitive to light. In 2003, Nagel demonstrated that channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) functions in mammalian cells, where blue light caused a significant change in the cell's electrical charge. After this experiment, ChR2 was used in hippocampal neurons with Karl Deisseroth, where light pulses triggered electrical signals in the neurons with very precise timing. The first use of optogenetics in a living animal, the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans, published in 2005 by Georg Nagel and Alexander Gottschalk, used a modified version of ChR2 (H134R) that Nagel developed to improve light responses. The first successful optogenetic method to stop neurons from firing (2007) was based on Nagel's earlier research with halorhodopsin from Natronomonas pharaonis. In 2007, Nagel, working with Peter Hegemann, began using optogenetics to control cAMP levels. In 2015, Nagel and Shiqiang Gao, with Alexander Gottschalk's team, identified the first 8 TM enzyme rhodopsin called Cyclop, which increases cGMP levels when activated by light. Through creating genetic tools, Nagel's group has expanded the use of light to control biological processes, from ion channels and pumps to signaling systems, and applied these methods to many organisms, including plants.

Awards (selection)

• 2010 Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, together with Peter Hegemann and Ernst Bamberg
• 2010 Karl Heinz Beckurts Prize, together with Peter Hegemann und Ernst Bamberg
• 2012 Zülch Prize
• 2013 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, together with Peter Hegemann
• 2013 The Brain Prize, awarded by the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation
• 2015 selected as Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)
• 2019 Rumford Prize for "extraordinary contributions related to the invention and refinement of optogenetics," with Ernst Bamberg, Ed Boyden, Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Gero Miesenböck
• 2020 Shaw Prize in Life Sciences.