In the version of this article initially published online, first, a relevant citation was omitted. To correct this, the sixth sentence of the introduction, which originally read "one study employed nonthermal magnetogenetic control of somatic tissues to regulate blood glucose11, but a genetically encoded, single-component magnetogenetic system has yet to be applied to the nervous system," has been rewritten to say "one study employed nonthermal magnetogenetic control of somatic tissues to regulate blood glucose11 and another utilized a naturally occurring iron-containing magnetoreceptor to trigger neuronal activity48, but a genetically encoded, single-component magnetogenetic system has yet to be applied to the nervous system of behaving vertebrates." Ref. 48 is provided as follows: Long, X., Ye, J., Zhao, D. & Zhang, S.J. Magnetogenetics: remote non-invasive magnetic activation of neuronal activity with a magnetoreceptor. Sci. Bull. (Beijing) 60, 2107–2119 (2015). Second, the author contribution statement incorrectly listed M.P.B as having performed experiments. This has been corrected to say that M.P.B. provided conceptual help during the development of the prototype channel. Finally, the reporter construct in the right panel of Figure 2e was mislabeled Camk2a::Cre-EGFP. This control construct should have been labeled Camk2a::EGFP. The errors have been corrected for the print, PDF and HTML versions of this article.