Environmental Microbiology

Biography

Karin Moelling was trained as Physicist, she analyzed Retroviruses, including HIV/AIDS, oncogenes, cander and more recently microbiology and virome . She worked at the max Planck Inst Berlin and was Director and Prof at the Univ Zürich, from where she retired. She published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers, and published a book on HIV and recently on viruses, phages, giant viruses, microorganisms wth emphasis on the their role in other cases than disease: “More Freinds than Foes, fantastic stories about viruses” (World Scient.Press, 2016)

Research Interest

Mölling's research interests focused primarily on retroviruses, particular human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), on which she began work as a graduate student. She is well known for her discovery of the ribonuclease H activity of reverse transcriptase, which is required for viral proliferation.Her work in this area led to the development of a DNA-based candidate HIV vaccine for which she led clinical trials.She has also worked on oncogenes, leading to the isolation of the Myc transcription factor protein;on virus diagnostics; and more recently on the evolutionary history of retroviruses and retrotransposons.