Johanna Döbereiner

Johanna Liesbeth Dobereiner, born Kubelka ( born November 28, 1924 in Ústí nad Labem ( Usti nad Labem ); † 5 October 2000 in Seropédica ) was a Brazilian agronomist German - Czech origin. Their research results in the field of biotic nitrogen fixation were the basis of a more efficient soybean production in Brazil and contributed to the fact that the country was the second largest soybean producer in the world.

Life and work

Dobereiner was born in 1924 in Ústí nad Labem and grew up in Prague. There, her father worked as a teacher at the German University. During the Second World War began as a 17 -year-olds in child care and then to work in agriculture, the contact with their parents and grandparents was only rarely possible. 1945 her family was displaced as Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. Dobereiner then worked on farms in Germany and studied from 1947 Agricultural Sciences at the University of Munich. In 1950, she graduated with a degree in agricultural engineering. In the same year, she emigrated with her ​​husband, the veterinary Jürgen Dobereiner, to Brazil. In 1956 she participated in the Brazilian citizenship.

In Rio de Janeiro Dobereiner took over in 1951 a position in the Research Department of the Brazilian Ministry of Agrarian Culture (now Embrapa ), where she worked in the field of soil microbiology. In 1951, she published her first scientific publication in which she described the impact of covering of vegetables on the population of soil bacteria. In 1958, she and her team identified the nitrogen -binding Rhizosphärebakterium Beijerinckia fluminensis. In 1966 she discovered the bacterium Azotobacter paspali that lives at the root surface of grasses, as they grew up on the campus of Embrapa.

In 1963 she earned a Master of Science degree at the University of Wisconsin with a thesis on the subject Manganese toxicity in Rhizobium -bean symbiosis (Phaseolus vulgaris L.).

Döbereiner research focus has been in the agricultural use of nitrogen - fixing bacteria instead of nitrogen fertilizer, thus reducing the production costs and the environmental impact is connected. In the 1960s, they convinced the organizers of the Brazilian soybean breeding program to select the soybean species used exclusively for the possibility of biotic nitrogen fixation. This circumstance made ​​it possible for Brazil to become the second largest soybean producer. Their growth accelerator for soy replaced annually fertilizer worth 2.5 billion dollars.

Dobereiner in 1981 was a founding member of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World ( TWAS ) and was a member since 1978 of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and since 1977 the Academia de Ciencias Brasileña whose vice president was in 1995.

She has published over 370 articles in scientific journals. A study by the Folha de S. Paulo in 1997 identified Dobereiner was the most frequently cited female scientist in Brazil and one of the 10 percent most cited scientists in Brazil as a whole.

Dobereiner died on 5 October 2000 from the effects of Alzheimer's.

Awards (selection)

Ehrentaxa

• Azospirillum doebereinerae
• Gluconacetobacter johannae

Publications (selection )

• Limitations and potentials for biological nitrogen fixation in the tropics. Plenum Press, New York 1978, ISBN 0306365103rd
• Nitrogen - fixing bacteria in nonleguminous crop plants. Madison, Wis.. : Science Tech Publishers, Springer -Verlag, Berlin, 1987, ISBN 0,910,239,118th
• Evaluation of nitrogen fixation in legumes by the regression of total plant nitrogen with nodule weight. in Nature, 210, 1996, pp. 850-852.