Otto Kandler was born on 23 October 1920 in Deggendorf, Bavaria, as the 6th child of the family of a market gardener. Growing up and helping in his father's garden, early on, he became interested in plant life and nature in general. He

In addition to his interest in plant physiology and biochemistry Otto Kandler early on focused on bacteria, above all, on the presence or absence

Louis Pasteur was one of Kandler's scientific heroes. Kandler liked to cite Pasteur's opinion that there is no "applied science", but that there are rather "applications of science". When he was director of the Bacteriological Institute of the South German Dairy

• 1971 German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
• 1981 Dr. h.c. (Ghent University)
• 1982 Regensburger Botanische Gesellschaft

Otto Kandler was very interested in plant growth processes, photosynthesis, metabolism, especially of carbohydrates. As the first in Germany he

Otto Kandler's main subject in microbiology was his research on archaea (before 1990 called "archaebacteria"). His discovery (October 1976)

Kandler's role as an early representative of scientific ecology is less known. He was a cofounder of the "commission for ecology" at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (now "Forum für Ökologie" –