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Paul W. Sternberg grew up in Long Island, New York. He attended Hampshire College for undergrad in Amherst, Massachusetts where he got a B.A. in 1978. After that he went to MIT where he received his PhD in Biology for work on nematode development with Robert Horvitz. He went on to do postdoctoral research with Ira Herskowitz in yeast molecular development at the University of California San Francisco.

WormBase
Sternberg is a Primary investigator for WormBase. WormBase is a data repository for nematode biology. C.Elegans has been used in studies of development and neurobiology. Wormbase has information from 9 species and 5 are from the Caenorhabditis genus one of which is C.elegans. Wormbase provides: a genome browser, genome, gene and protein sets for searches on sequence similarities and gene and protein summaries.

Gene Ontology Consortium
He also serves as a primary investigator for the Gene Ontology consortium. The consortium provides knowledge on the functions of genes and gene products. It was founded in 1998 and is widely accepted in the life sciences. The Gene Ontology resource has the most comprehensive information about the functions of genes. ”The ontology covers three distinct aspects of gene function: molecular function, cellular component, and biological process”.

Current Research
Sternberg is a coauthor on the article, "Autism-associated missense genetic variants impact locomotion and neurodevelopment in Caenorhabditis elegans". They used C. elegans as a genetic model to look for phenotypic missense alleles collected from autism spectrum disorder studies done in humans. Missense variants cause around half the genetic changes that are known to cause disease. They used CRISPR-Cas9 to generate C. elegans equivalent  human missense mutants. They compared the phenotypes from the missense mutants to the wildtype and known loss- of- function mutant controls in the autism-associated missense alleles.They found that 70% of missense alleles showed evident phenotypic changes in locomotion, morphology, and fecundity. They used this method to show subtle phenotypic changes and the effect that missense mutations can have on human disease. They did find that 14 missense variants have a significant function in C.elegans orthologs of human genes.

2019 publications

 * 1) Beltran T, Barroso C, Birkel TY, Stevens L, Schwartz HT, Sternberg PW, Fradin H, Gunsalus K, Piano F, Sharma G, Cerrato C, Ahringer J, Martinez-Perez E, Blaxter M, Sarkies P. (2019). Comparative Epigenomics Reveals that RNA Polymerase II Pausing and Chromatin Domain Organization Control nematode piRNA Biogenesis. Developmental Cell, 48(6), 793-810. PMCID: PMC6436959.
 * 2) The Gene Ontology Consortium. (2019). The Gene Ontology resource: 20 years and still GOing strong. Nucleic Acids Res, 47(D1), D330-D338.
 * 3) Shih PY, Lee JS, Sternberg PW. (2019). Genetic markers enable the verification and manipulation of the daur entry decision. Dev. Biol, 454(2), 170-180.
 * 4) Sternberg PW. (2019). Opening up a large can of worms. Nat Genet, 51(1), 10-11.
 * 5) Sternberg PW. (2019). Ablating the fixed lineage conjecture: Commentary on Kimble 1981. Dev Biol, 446(1), 1-16.
 * 6) Wong WR, Brugman KI, Maher S, Oh JY, Howe K, Kato M, Sternberg PW. (2019). Autism-associated missense genetic variants impact locomotion and development in Caenorhabditis elegans. Hum Mol Genet, 28(13), 2271-2281. PMCID: PMC6586145.
 * 7) Beltran T, Barroso C, Birkel TY, Stevens L, Schwartz HT, Sternberg PW, Fradin H, Gunsalus K, Piano F, Sharma G, Cerrato C, Ahringer J, Martinez-Perez E, Blaxter M, Sarkies P. (2019). Comparative Epigenomics Reveals that RNA Polymerase II Pausing and Chromatin Domain Organization Control nematode piRNA Biogenesis. Developmental Cell, 48(6), 793-810. PMCID: PMC6436959.
 * 8) The Gene Ontology Consortium. (2019). The Gene Ontology resource: 20 years and still GOing strong. Nucleic Acids Res, 47(D1), D330-D338.
 * 9) Shih PY, Lee JS, Sternberg PW. (2019). Genetic markers enable the verification and manipulation of the daur entry decision. Dev. Biol, 454(2), 170-180.
 * 10) Sternberg PW. (2019). Opening up a large can of worms. Nat Genet, 51(1), 10-11.
 * 11) Sternberg PW. (2019). Ablating the fixed lineage conjecture: Commentary on Kimble 1981. Dev Biol, 446(1), 1-16.
 * 12) Wong WR, Brugman KI, Maher S, Oh JY, Howe K, Kato M, Sternberg PW. (2019). Autism-associated missense genetic variants impact locomotion and development in Caenorhabditis elegans. Hum Mol Genet, 28(13), 2271-2281. PMCID: PMC6586145.