Microbial nutrition
Lwoff joined the Pasteur Institute as a young researcher and initially studied protozoa with Édouard Chatton. He obtained his medical degree in 1927 and a science doctorate in 1932. Work on microbial growth factors led him to further biochemical research in Heidelberg and Cambridge.
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Lysogeny and phage induction
In 1950 Lwoff, Louis Siminovitch and Niels Kjeldgaard investigated the induction of bacteriophage production in lysogenic bacteria by ultraviolet radiation. The work helped explain how the genetic material of certain phages could persist in a latent state within bacteria before entering a cycle that produced virus particles.
Virology and the shared prize
Lwoff became a department head at the Pasteur Institute in 1938 and later studied temperature-related properties of poliovirus. In 1965 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jacob and Monod, whose related research addressed genetic regulation and virus synthesis from different experimental directions.