Karl-Ernst Wohlfarth-Bottermann

Karl-Ernst Wohlfarth-Bottermann (born May 22, 1923 in Witten ; † September 29, 1997 in Bonn ) was a German cell biologist and professor at the University of Bonn .

Wohlfarth-Bottermann was a soldier from 1942, was wounded on the Eastern Front and was then in hospitals until the end of the war. He then worked for two years on the farm in Lower Saxony and from 1947 studied biology at the University of Cologne . In 1951 he received his doctorate from the University of Münster , where he was already working with the electron microscope . As a post-doctoral student he was in Braunschweig and Stockholm with Fritiof Sjöstrand , where he dealt with ultrastructures of the cytoplasm . After his habilitation , he was the first director of the central laboratory for applied microscopy at the University of Bonn. In 1965 he was the founding director of the Institute for Cytology and Micromorphology in Bonn and he became the first professor for cell biology in Germany. In 1988 he retired.

He investigated cell movement and its structural and physiological basis in the cell using the slime mold Physarum polycephalum and amoeba . He started doing this in the mid-1950s and used electron microscopy and phase contrast microscopy at the same time . Using the model of slime molds, he was able to correlate contraction and relaxation phases in the cytoplasm with the formation or dissolution of actin microfilaments and recognized the importance of ATP-ase for contraction and the role of isometric contraction in the formation of actin bundles and isotonic contraction for their dissolution. He presented his results in 1963 at a conference on cell movement in Princeton, but they did not gain general acceptance until the 1970s.

He was also able to detect a cytoskeleton made of actin microfilaments (which is not visible with the usual light microscope) in the outermost cytoplasmic layer , which is responsible for the movement, in the movement of amoeba .

He had been a member of the Leopoldina since 1974 and received the Leopoldina Schleiden Medal in 1977 . He was on the board of directors of the ECBO (European Cell Biology Organization) and one of the founders and vice-president of the German Society for Cell Biology . He was also on the scientific council of the Max Planck Society .

In 1968 he founded the journal Cytobiologie (later the European Journal of Cell Biology).

Fonts

• Contrasting animal cells and tissues as part of their electron microscopic examination on ultra-thin sections . In: Naturwissenschaften, Volume 44, 1957, pp. 287–288 Science Citation Classics (PDF)

Web links

• Obituary in Acta Protozoologica 1998 by Glebecki, Korohoda (PDF)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member entry by Karl Ernst Wohlfarth-Bottermann at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on October 23, 2015.