Michel Rohmer

Michel Rohmer, born on 31 January 1948, is a French chemist specialising in the chemistry of micro-organisms. He has particularly studied isoprenoids.
He is a member of the French Academy of sciences.

Biography

Michel Rohmer studied at the École nationale supérieure de chimie in Strasbourg. He defended his thesis at the Louis-Pasteur University in Strasbourg in 1975 in Guy Ourisson's laboratory. He became professor of organic and bio-organic chemistry at the École nationale supérieure de chimie de Mulhouse from 1979 to 1994, then returned to the Université Louis-Pasteur in Strasbourg. He was Director of the Institut de chimie de Strasbourg. Since 1 September 2013, he has been Professor Emeritus of the University of Strasbourg.

Michel Rohmer is working on isoprenoids, a class of natural substances familiar to all in the form of cholesterol in our cells. He studied hopanoids in particular, which are found in sedimentary rock materials. He then discovered biohopanoids, a family of pentacyclic triterpenoids. His work on the biosynthesis of these bacterial hopanoids is revolutionizing the understanding of the early stages of isoprenoid biosynthesis. Rohmer proposes a new biosynthetic pathway leading to the universal precursors of isoprenoids, isopentenyl and dimethylallyl diphosphates. This path is different from the mevalonate path that has been accepted for more than fifty years. The metabolic pathway of methylerythritol phosphate is widely distributed in bacteria, which are omnipresent in the chloroplasts of phototrophic organisms.