Main areas of research and most important scientific/scholarly results achieved to date

Research interests

• de novo and redesign of enzymes as well as fluorescent proteins
• de novo design of barrel and pore like proteins
• methods development for de novo protein design

Methods

• computational techniques (molecular modeling, biomolecular de novo design and structure prediction, programming)
• molecular biology techniques (e.g. gene assembly, protein expression and characterization)
• biophysical methods (biomolecular X-ray crystallography, CD-spectroscopy, SAXS, native MS)

Scientific achievements

The focus of G. Oberdorfer’s research group is in designing and engineering biomolecular structures and their functions – a very interdisciplinary approach that combines computational biology, structural biology, biochemistry and biophysics approaches. Since he joined the faculty in Graz, his group's major contribution to the life science community was the establishment of enzyme and protein design as well as de novo structure prediction techniques. During his postdoc, G. Oberdorfer co-developed a computational method to de novo design a-helical proteins with fine-tuned backbone geometries and unprecedented thermodynamic stabilities. With his research group he now focuses on broadening the design methodology and applying the repertoire of designable structures to biomedical and biotechnological problems, such as enzyme engineering, nanopore sequencing or designing novel fluorescent proteins.