Introduction: My Scientific Interests Before Woese’s Discovery of the Archaea
In my Master Thesis work in 1969 in Otto Kandler’s lab at the Botanical Institute in Munich, I studied kinetics of lactic acid isomer formation in a variety of Lactobacilli including some isolates obtained by myself. Otto Kandler told me personally how to hunt for new microbes and how to isolate and describe them.
Since Orla-Jensen (1919), the kind of lactic acid isomer formed had been taken as constant for a Lactobacillus species and, therefore served as an important taxonomic marker. However in my investigations several species (e.g., Lactobacillus curvatus) exhibited powerful changes of the isomer composition depending on the growth phase. In my following PhD work (finished in 1973) on the biochemistry of lactic acid formation in Lactobacilli, I discovered a novel lactic acid racemase in L. curvatus. In the presence of bivalent Manganese ions, it was induced by L (+) – lactate that was then converted into...
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Stetter, K.O. (2011). History of Discovery of Hyperthermophiles. In: Horikoshi, K. (eds) Extremophiles Handbook. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-53898-1_19
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