Léon Le Minor

Léon Le Minor (born April 16, 1920 in Pont-l'Abbé ) is a French microbiologist who was laboratory manager at the Pasteur Institute .

Live and act

Le Minor attended the Collège de La Tour d'Auvergne in Quimper and studied medicine in Tours (graduated in 1940) with subsequent practical training at the Tours hospital (1941). From 1943 he was at the Pasteur Institute, where he became an assistant in 1945 and was responsible for the salmonella laboratory in 1947 , of which he became head a year later. In 1945 he received his doctorate in medicine ( Docteur en médecine ) and in 1958 he was appointed lecturer ( Maître de conférences ). In 1959 he became head of the enterobacteria department and professor at the Pasteur Institute. In 1965 a second doctorate followed ( Docteur d'état ès sciences naturelles ) and in the same year he became head of the international salmonella center belonging to the WHO . Since 1967 he was a professor without a chair at the medical faculty in Paris and from 1970 professor for bacteriology and virology at the Faculté de médecine Necker . From 1977 to the mid-1990s he headed the research group of the French national research organization for medicine INSERM on enterobacteria. Before that, from 1952 he was a member of the Enterobacteria sub-committee of the international association of microbiological societies , in the 1960s he was a member of the INSERM commissions on bacteriology and virology and on the scientific board of the Pasteur Institute. In 1989 he retired, but retained an honorary professorship at the Necker Faculty of Medicine and remained Chef de Service Honoraire at the Pasteur Institute.

Le Minor is a leading French microbiologist. At the end of the 1940s he succeeded in isolating and characterizing a large number of Salmonella strains, which at the time caused dangerous epidemics, especially among children. He was also later a leading international expert on salmonella taxonomy (of which over 2500 serotypes are known today). From the 1950s he studied enterobacteria, especially Escherichia coli , their taxonomy and pathogenicity as the cause of diarrheal diseases. He applied biochemical methods early on, such as the RFLP technique with Patrick AD Grimont or the Analytical Profile Index (API) with Claude Richard.

In 1947 he received the silver medal of the Académie nationale de Médecine (of which he has been a member since 1983) and in 1958 the Prix ​​La Caze of the Académie des Sciences . In 1965 he received the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize . He is an officer of the Legion of Honor (1968), commander of the Ordre national du mérite and the Ordre de la santé publique (1955). In 1957 he became general secretary of the French Society for Microbiology ( Société Française de Microbiologie ).

In 1985 the first description of a group of enterobacteria (previously referred to as Enteric Group 57 ), whose generic name was chosen in his honor: Leminorella . In their publication, Hickman-Brenner et al. on his significant contribution to the nomenclature and research of the serotypes of Salmonella, to the research of plasmids exchanged by conjugation between bacterial species , and the rapid biochemical methods for the identification of enterobacteria. At the same time, they emphasize that the generic name Leminorella was also chosen in honor of his wife and colleague Simone Le Minor and refer to her contribution to enterobacteria as head of the national salmonella center of France as well as research on the serotypes of Serratia .

Fonts

• Le Diagnostic de laboratoire des entérobactéries , 3rd edition, Éditions de la Tourelle, Paris 1967
• with M. Véron Bactériologie médicale , Flammarion Médecine-Sciences, Paris 1989
• Méthodes de laboratoire pour l'identification des entérobactéries , Institut Pasteur, Paris 1993
• He was the editor of the Salmonella section in several internationally distributed standard works such as Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology , The Prokaryotes, A Handbook of the Biology of Bacteria , Methods in Bacteriology .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ FW Hickman-Brenner, MP Vohra, GP Huntley-Carter, GR Fanning, VA Lowery III, DJ Brenner, JJ Farmer III: Leminorella, a new genus of Enterobacteriaceae: identification of Leminorella grimontii sp. nov. and Leminorella richardii sp. nov. found in clinical specimens . In: Journal of Clinical Microbiology . tape 21 , no. 2 , February 1985, p. 234-239 , PMID 3972991 , PMC 271620 (free full text).

Web links

• Biography at Inserm