Reacción a "Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology Awarded to Deisseroth, Hegemann, and Nagel for Their Discoveries on Light-Activated Ion Channels and Optogenetics"

The discovery and development of these light-activated channels – in short, the birth of optogenetics – has brought about a hugely significant paradigm shift in brain research.

With optogenetics, we can use light stimuli to very specifically activate or inhibit particular groups of neurons, thereby identifying their causal role in specific actions and behaviours in experimental animals. This has been, and remains, one of the key questions in neuroscience: determining which neurons and which neural circuits are responsible for our actions or moods.

Consequently, the major contribution of these scientists to neuroscience research is the fundamental tool for investigating both healthy and diseased brains, enabling us to move from identifying the neuronal alterations associated with a disease to determining which ones are causally responsible for its symptoms, thereby providing a basis for developing more selective and personalised treatments.