Studying under the supervision of Barker at Berkeley, Thressa and Earl were both influenced by the ideas of the "Delft School" of microbiology, a group of scientists who had pioneered the use of microorganisms in biochemical investigations. This school was led by Martinus W. Beijerinck, the first professor of microbiology at the Technical School in Delft in the Netherlands in 1885, and by Albert J. Kluyver, who succeeded Beijerinck in 1921.
Along with the Russian scientist Sergey Winogradsky, Beijerinck developed a useful laboratory technique called the "enrichment culture method." This method allowed biochemists to isolate bacteria capable of degrading particular chemical compounds they were interested in. Later, Kluyver proposed an important conceptual tool, the principle of the "unity of metabolism" in nature, which stated the basic similarity of biochemical behavior in many different organisms. This principle has been proven correct in many instances and is particularly useful in tackling problems of the metabolism of higher organisms by the study of bacterial metabolism. For this reason, Kluyver is known as the founder of comparative biochemistry.
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Martinus W. Beijerinck's Laboratory for Microbiology in Delft
