Alcaligenes Eutrophus and Its Scientific and Industrial Career

Abstract

To be asked to function as a chairman and to deliver an introductory lecture taking more than 30 seconds provides the rare opportunity to present a historical account on an organism which is now widely used. Alcaligenes eutrophus is a knallgas bacterium (Figure 1). My motivation to study knallgas bacteria came from the notion that life is based on a knallgas (oxyhydrogen) reaction. When I came across this remark in a biophysics textbook (Netter, 1951) in 1951 my attention was directed to the knallgas bacteria, which were well known to botanists and biophysicists in that time. It was the time when the major metabolic pathways such as CO₂ fixation via the ribulosebis-phosphate pathway, the basic reactions of respiration and photosynthesis and the pathways of amino acid synthesis were not yet known. At the universities of Leipzig and Halle, where I received my doctor’s degree, we obtained access to the books and journals, which had appeared between 1940 and 1950 in England and the United States, not before 1951. As a literature recherche of the old and the post-war journals indicated, the knallgas bacteria had escaped the interest of microbiologists for about 30 years.