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mSphere Legacy: Fritz about Fritz | mSphere
I began my research career in the late 1970s with my doctoral thesis at LMU Munich under Karl Heinz Schleifer in the Department of Microbiology. At the time, the department was a hotspot for bacterial classification, cell wall structure analysis, staphylococcal physiology, and metabolism. I became particularly interested in the latter areas and studied fructose-1,6-bisphosphate (FBP)-activated L-lactate dehydrogenase in Staphylococcus epidermidis and a highly stable class I FBP aldolase in Staphylococcus aureus (1). I also investigated oxygen consumption mediated by pyruvate oxidase in Lactobacillus plantarum, demonstrating that this bacterium does not require an enzymatic superoxide dismutase because it can use Mn-phosphate/pyrophosphate for superoxide scavenging—an example of the diverse mechanisms that bacteria employ to cope with oxidative stress (2–4). My scientific environment was shaped by the work of Karl-Heinz Schleifer (Technical University of Munich) and Wesley E. Kloos (North Carolina State University) who made foundational contributions to the identification and classification of Staphylococcus species, particularly during the 1970s, when bacterial systematics was undergoing major modernization. The Kloos–Schleifer classification frameworks remained standard references for the identification of staphylococci well into the molecular era (5, 6).
