Karl Stetter
Karl Otto Stetter (* July 16, 1941 in Munich) is a German microbiologist. He is an expert on microbial life in extreme living conditions ( extremophile organisms), especially at high temperatures.
Life
Stetter put his Abitur at the State Luitpold- secondary school in Munich in 1960 and studied biology at the Technical University of Munich, diploma biologist in 1969. He wrote his doctoral thesis in microbiology on Lactobacillus at the Technical University of Munich and holds a Dr. rer. nat. (1973). After postdoctoral ( Biochemistry) from 1973 to 1975 at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, followed in 1977 Habilitation in Microbiology and Botany at the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich. From 1980 to 2002 he was Associate Professor, Chair of Microbiology at the Faculty of Natural Sciences III and head of Archaeenzentrums the University of Regensburg. He is co-founder of DIVERSA Corp.. , San Diego 1994 ]. Since 2002 he is professor emeritus.
Karl Stetter is married and has two daughters and a son, the actor Florian Stetter.
Work
The research of Stetter refers to collecting, isolating, culturing and characterization of extremophiles. These microorganisms live under extreme living conditions ( under low or high temperatures, high pressure, without oxygen, at low or high pH or high salt concentration). They are found in the deep sea, in hydrothermal vents in volcanoes or glaciers. Many belong to the archaea, the third domain of life. Stetter and his team worked intensively on Nanoarchaeum equitans ( the riding Urzwerg ) with the smallest known genome. This archaebacterium, as before the archaea were called, is only 400 nm in size and lives on the surface of another archaeon ( Ignicoccus hospitalis ). This is one of his most important discoveries and was described in May 2002 in the journal Nature. The genome sequence was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.
Memberships
- Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Science ( IGPP ), University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA)
- Society for Biological Chemistry ( GBCh )
- American Society for Microbiology (ASM )
- German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology ( VAH )
- International Committee on Environmental Biogeochemistry ( ISEB )
- Association for General and Applied Microbiology ( VRAM )
- Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians ( GDNÄ )
- International Committee on Systematic Bacteriology ( ICSB )
- The International Institute of Biotechnology
- German Chemical Society ( German Chemical Society )
- German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
- Bavarian Academy of Sciences
- International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life ( ISSOL )
- Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen / Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( KNAW )