Auteur: Wolfgang Loffelhardt

Born in Vienna, Wolfgang Löffelhardt studied chemistry at the University of Vienna finalized 1972 with a thesis on the biosynthesis of secondary plant compounds. During a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Marburg/FRG he worked on aromatic metabolism in chloroplasts and – for comparative purposes – in cyanobacteria. This prompted his interest in the endosymbiotic evolution of plastids. Back in Vienna, he became lecturer and then associate professor at the Insitute of Biochemisty and Cell Biology which is now part of the Max F. Perutz Laboratories. In 1978 he found his favorite organism, Cyanophora paradoxa, which he has studied ever since, largely in collaboration with Hans J. Bohnert (Düsseldorf/FRG, Tucson/AZ, and Urbana/IL). The peculiar plastids of this alga are surrounded by an unique peptidoglycan wall, a convincing proof of the endosymbiont theory. After his retirement in October 2008 he joined the Cyanophora Genome Sequencing Project headed by Debashish Bhattacharya (New Brunswick/NJ). The recently completed genome corroborated the concept of a single primary endosymbiotic event, i.e., the monophyly of the kingdom “Plantae”.