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2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine Honors Breakthrough That Lets Scientists Control the Brain With Light (opens in a new tab)
scitechdaily.com · 2026-10-17
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2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine Honors Breakthrough That Lets Scientists Control the Brain With Light
scitechdaily.com · 2026-10-17
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Channelrhodopsin-2, a directly light-gated cation-selective membrane channel.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2003
- Also referencedmentioned without context
10.3389/fnins.2017.00663/full
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Claim 1 of 5Not checkedScientists who worked out how to control brain cells with light won the year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research into light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.View evidenceHide evidence
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Claim 2 of 5Not checkedBy putting channelrhodopsin into nerve cells, researchers can switch selected neurons on with light and use the method to test what specific brain cells do.View evidenceHide evidence
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Claim 3 of 5Not checkedPeter Hegemann and Georg Nagel discovered that Chlamydomonas uses a single protein called channelrhodopsin to detect light, and this finding underpins the optogenetics approach.View evidenceHide evidence
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Claim 4 of 5Not checkedIn a 2012 mouse experiment, light reactivated a tagged fear memory: mice that had been shocked froze in fear when the tagged cells were later switched on, while mice that were not shocked did not freeze.View evidenceHide evidence
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Claim 5 of 5Not checkedOptogenetics is already in early-stage clinical trials for retinal degeneration, and researchers are also investigating possible future treatments for Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.View evidenceHide evidence
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Candidate papers, not confirmed sources.
PubMed, Crossref, Europe PMC · 16 candidate papers
Channelrhodopsin-2, a directly light-gated cation-selective membrane channel.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2003 · PubMed
Engram reactivation mimics cellular signatures of fear.
Cell Reports · 2024 · PubMed
Decision letter: Defective memory engram reactivation underlies impaired fear memory recall in Fragile X syndrome
2020 · Crossref
Extinction-restraint intervention eradicates fear memory encoded in BLA engram cells via D2 receptor-mediated dopaminergic modulation from locus coeruleus.
2026 · Europe PMC
Dietary polyphenols enhance optogenetic recall of fear memory in hippocampal dentate gyrus granule neuron subpopulations.
Communications Biology · 2018 · PubMed