She started her scientific career in the Laboratory

of Toxicology under the supervision of Milutin Vandekar with methodological aspects of the determination of acetylcholine hydrolysis using the Warburg apparatus (Vandekar and Reiner, www.selleckchem.com/products/cb-839.html 1962). During her Alexander v. Humboldt scholarship at the Institute of Physiology at the University of Heidelberg headed by Wolfgang Hardegg she employed this method for the detection of several acetylcholine hydrolyzing enzymes in purified horse serum preparations that was published in Nature (Reiner et al., 1965). Next, Elsa Reiner spent some seven years in the M.R.C. Laboratories at Carshalton, Sussex, where a lot of this website important enzyme kinetic studies were published together with the late Norman Aldridge, culminating in their standard textbook “Enzyme inhibitors as substrates. Interactions of esterases with esters of organophosphorus and carbamic acids (Aldridge and Reiner, 1972). This legacy of the two important scientists is still a mostly cited book and a “must” for the cholinesterase community. Coming back to her Laboratory of Biochemistry at IMI in Zagreb, which she led until

her (official!) retirement in 2000, important enzyme kinetic studies on cholinesterases appeared with her coworkers Vera Simeon and Mira Skrinjaric-Spoljar during the 1970s and 1980s. The field was extended to structural aspects when Zoran Radić joined the scene. The importance of an allosteric peripheral binding site in cholinesterases was elaborated together with Palmer Taylor at La Jolla and resulted in the most often cited article of Elsa Reiner’s bibliography Dichloromethane dehalogenase (Radić et al., 1991). In the 1990s Elsa

Reiner turned to another group of mammalian esterases with the capability of splitting organophosphorus compounds, the so-called paraoxonases, including phenotyping studies. These studies touched nomenclatural aspects, which resulted in a joined publication with La Du et al. (1999). At the end of the last century, Zrinka Kovarik met the group and continued investigations on the relationship of structural aspects on functional properties of cholinesterases. It is she who heads her laboratory at IMI now. Even if Elsa Reiner had (formally!) retired, she was still active and gave her input in the scientific work almost until her passing. “E. Reiner led the Laboratory of Biochemistry with a strong hand and high professional skill, but also with sensitivity for everyday life and family problems for which we are very thankful to her” wrote her old co-worker Blanka Krauthacker in 2008. Besides these fundamental studies many applied aspects were touched by Elsa Reiner who placed her wide knowledge at the disposal, e.g. of the World Health Organization where she was an Expert Panel Member for almost 30 years.