Ohloff began his career in 1951 with Schimmel & Co. [de] in Miltitz near Leipzig, at that time the most renowned flavor and fragrance company. In 1953 he left Eastern Germany to take a position with Dragoco, Holzminden. In 1959 he was offered a position at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry in Mülheim with Günther Otto Schenck. There he worked on the industrial-scale application of photooxygenation reactions employing singlet oxygen, ene reactions and sigmatropic rearrangements. Ohloff returned to Industry in 1962, joining Firmenich in Geneva to head the process-research group. He was named the firm's research director and member of the board of directors in 1968, which he remained until his retirement in 1989.
Ohloff's scientific work, which is documented in 228 publications and 111 patents,[2] centered around the structure elucidation and reactivity of terpenes, the industrial syntheses of odorants, and structure–odor correlations. He was the leading expert of empirical odor rules that predict the olfactory properties of new compounds, such as the "triaxial rule of ambergris sensation". He co-discovered the Eschenmoser fragmentation, thus sometimes referred to Eschenmoser–Ohloff fragmentation.[3][4][5] His small but condensed magnum opus on the chemistry of odorants "Riechstoffe und Geruchssinn. Die molekulare Welt der Düfte" was republished in English in 2011, completely revised and much extended by Wilhelm Pickenhagen and Philip Kraft, as "Scent and Chemistry – The Molecular World of Odors".[6]
Günther Ohloff: Riechstoffe und Geruchssinn. Die molekulare Welt der Düfte, Springer, Berlin, 1990, ISBN3-540-52560-2. English translation: Scent and Fragrances: The Fascination of Odors and Their Chemical Perspectives, Springer, New York, 1994, ISBN0-387-57108-6
Günther Ohloff: Irdische Düfte, himmlische Lust, Birkhäuser, Basel, 2000, ISBN3-7643-2753-7. English translation projected with Verlag Helvetica Chimica Acta, Zürich, for 2012
^Ferdinand Näf, Wilhelm Pickenhagen: Günther Ohloff (1924–2005), Nachrichten aus der Chemie54 (2006), 335
^Wolfgang Giersch, Rerald Uhde, Ferdinand Näf: Günther Ohloff – Chemist & Pioneer in the Art of Perfumery, Chimia 58 (2004) 65−66
^A. Eschenmoser, D. Felix and G. Ohloff (1967). "Eine neuartige Fragmentierung cyclischer α,β-ungesättigter Carbonylsysteme; Synthese von Exalton und rac-Muscon aus Cyclododecanon Vorläufige Mitteilung". Helvetica Chimica Acta. 50 (2): 708–713. doi:10.1002/hlca.19670500232.
^J. Schreiber, D. Felix, A. Eschenmoser, M. Winter, F. Gautschi, K. H. Schulte-Elte, E. Sundt, G. Ohloff, J. Kalovoda, H. Kaufmann, P. Wieland, G. Anner Helvetica Chimica Acta1967, 50 , (7), 2101-2108
^D. Felix, J. Schreiber, G. Ohloff, A. Eschenmoser Helvetica Chimica Acta1971, 54, (8), 2896-2912