Robert Schwarzenbacher

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Robert Schwarzenbacher (born 1973 in Mittersill ) is an Austrian biochemist and chemistry teacher. Until his dismissal after a confirmed falsification allegation, he was professor of structural biology at the University of Salzburg.

life and work

Robert Schwarzenbacher studied chemistry and biochemistry at the Graz University of Technology and graduated in 1997 as a qualified engineer in biochemistry and biotechnology. His doctoral thesis on Molecular Structure of apolipoproteins and lipid-protein complexes was carried out at the Institute for Biophysics and X-ray Structure Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences , where he received his doctorate in 1999 . From 2000 to 2005 he went to the United States and worked first at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla and subsequently at the Center for Structural Genomics, which is run in cooperation with the Burnham Institute and the University of California - San Diego . Among other things, he worked on programmed cell death (apoptosis) and published a paper on the activity of a protease- activating factor of adenosine diphosphate (ADP) under the direction of Yigong Shi from Princeton University and together with Stefan Riedl and other authors .

In 2005 Schwarzenbacher returned to Austria and was appointed Professor of Protein Engineering Biotechnology in the Molecular Biology Department at the University of Salzburg . He worked on various topics related to the identification and structure and function elucidation of various proteins and protein complexes. In 2009 he again published a study with his colleague Stefan Riedl and eight other authors that was described as groundbreaking and in which they propose a hypothesis about the mechanism of programmed cell death in the human body. The authors speculated that one day new drugs against cancer cells could be produced with it.

In 2009, Schwarzenbacher and colleagues published a paper on the structure of allergens in birch pollen in The Journal of Immunology , the results of which were scientifically questioned by the crystallographer Bernhard Rupp in a letter to the university and in a separate article, and to which Schwarzenbacher and colleagues answered. The authors confirmed the fabrication of the crystallographic data by Schwarzenbacher and in April 2013 they published a correction of the publication in which they withdrew Schwarzenbacher's crystallographic structural models based on fabricated data.

The employment relationship was terminated in March 2012 following the confirmed allegations and an investigation by the Austrian Agency for Scientific Integrity in Vienna. Since 2012, Schwarzenbacher has been working as a chemistry teacher, initially at the Technical College Itzling in Salzburg and since 2014 at a grammar school.

The PubMed biosciences database lists 93 of his scientific publications. Schwarzenbacher is a co-author of most of the 93 publications, including numerous articles with more than 20 authors.

Awards

In 2001 Schwarzenbacher received an Erwin Schrödinger research grant. In 2005 he received the Marie Curie Excellence Grant worth 1.7 million for his work on programmed cell death.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Josef Thalhammer: International Prize for Science and Research: Univ-prof. Dr. DI Robert Schwarzenbacher. ( Memento from November 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) kulturfonds.at; Retrieved May 9, 2015.
  2. ↑ Stefan J. Riedl, Wenyu Li, Yang Chao, Robert Schwarzenbacher, Yigong Shi: Structure of the apoptotic protease-activating factor 1 bound to ADP. In: Nature. 434, April 14, 2005, pp. 926-933. doi: 10.1038 / nature03465
  3. ↑ Fiona L. Scott, Boguslaw Stec, Cristina Pop, Mal strokegorzata K. Dobaczewska, JeongEun J. Lee, Edward Monosov, Howard Robinson, Guy S. Salvesen, Robert Schwarzenbacher, Stefan J. Riedl: The Fas-FADD death domain complex structure unravels signaling by receptor clustering. In: Nature. 457, February 19, 2009, pp. 1019-1022. doi: 10.1038 / nature07606
  4. ↑ Nadja Zaborsky, Marietta Brunner, Michael Wallner, Martin Himly, Tanja Karl, Robert Schwarzenbacher, Fatima Ferreira, Gernot Achatz: Antigen Aggregation Decides the Fate of the Allergic Immune Response. In: The Journal of Immunology. 184 (2), January 2010, pp. 725-735. (Full text)
  5. ↑ B. Rupp: Detection and analysis of unusual features in the structural model and structure-factor data of a birch pollen allergen. In: Acta Crystallographica Section F, Structural Biology and Crystallization Communications. 68 (4), 2012. doi: 10.1107 / S1744309112008421
  6. ↑ N. Zaborsky, M. Brunner, M. Wallner, M. Himly, T. Karl, R. Schwarzenbacher, F. Ferreira, G. Achatz: Response to Detection and analysis of unusual features in the structural model and structure-factor data of a birch pollen allergen. In: Acta Crystallographica Section F, Structural Biology and Crystallization Communications. 68 (4), 2012. doi: 10.1107 / S1744309112008433
  7. ↑ N. Zaborsky, M. Brunner, M. Wallner, M. Himly, T. Karl, R. Schwarzenbacher, F. Ferreira, G. Achatz: Correction: Antigen aggregation decides the fate of the allergic immune response. In: The Journal of Immunology. 190 (8), April 2013, p. 4432. (full text)
  8. ↑ Process of terminated molecular biologists ended . In: derstandard.at, published on September 26, 2012; Retrieved April 2, 2013.
  9. ↑ A quit scientist becomes HTL teacher. APA, DiePresse.com, August 13, 2012, accessed December 1, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Schwarzenbacher, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian biochemist and chemistry teacher
DATE OF BIRTH 1973
PLACE OF BIRTH Mittersill