While at Berkeley, he authored and edited three influential textbooks, Medical Microbiology (with Ernest Jawetz and Joseph Melnick) in 1954; The Microbial World (with Roger Stanier and Michael Douderoff) in 1957; and Papers on Bacterial Genetics in 1960.
He held a dual appointment as Professor of Molecular Biology and Biophysics from 1962 to 1966, and joined the Department of Human Genetics, which he helped organize, in 1972.
Over the course of his 42-year academic career, Adelberg published over 200 papers in five research areas: (1) the biosynthesis of amino acids isoleucine and valine in Neurospora and Escherichia coli; (2) genetic regulation of amino acid biosynthesis in E. coli: (3) mechanisms of mutation in bacteria; (4) the bacterial chromosome, sex factors, and conjugations; and (5) membrane transport in cultured mammalian cells.
[14] Adelberg's early research on bacterial conjugation also helped lay the groundwork for the field of recombinant DNA and genetic engineering.
Following a sabbatical working with Francois Jacob at the Pasteur Institute in 1956-57, Adelberg discovered the phenomenon known variously as “F-mediated transduction,” “F-duction,” and sexduction, which consists of the transfer through recombination of chromosomal fragments by the sex factor (F) during bacterial conjugation.
[16] Building on this work, Herbert Boyer, a post-doctoral fellow in Adelberg’s laboratory at Yale in 1963-66, conducted research on restriction and modification in bacterial conjugation which led to the founding of the first biotech company, Genentech, and to the Boyer-Cohen method of gene-splicing.