Nat Sternberg

Nat L. Sternberg (August 2, 1942 – September 26, 1995) was an American molecular biologist and bacteriophage researcher, particularly known for his work on DNA recombination and the phage P1.

[2] In 1970–72, Sternberg held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, under the direction of François Gros, where he researched the head proteins of phage λ.

He then returned to the US, taking up the position of staff fellow in the laboratory of Robert Weisberg at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he continued to study λ, in collaboration with Lynn W. Enquist and others.

Sternberg, Brian Sauer and others in his group subsequently showed that Cre–lox is a flexible recombination system which also functions in eukaryotic cells, and it is now widely used in genetic engineering.

[1][2][5] The Nat L. Sternberg Thesis Prize, an annual award for PhD theses in the field of prokaryotic molecular biology, was founded in his memory by former colleagues Lynn W. Enquist and Thomas J.