Lubert Stryer (March 2, 1938 – April 8, 2024) was an American academic who was the Emeritus Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor ofCell Biology, atStanford University School of Medicine.[1][2] His research over more than four decades had been centered on the interplay of light and life. In 2006 he received theNational Medal of Science fromPresident Bush at a ceremony at the White House for elucidating the biochemical basis of signal amplification in vision, pioneering the development of high densitymicroarrays forgenetic analysis, and authoring the standard undergraduate biochemistry textbook,Biochemistry.[3] It is now in its tenth edition and also edited byJeremy Berg, Justin Hines, John L. Tymoczko and Gregory J. Gatto, Jr.[4]
Stryer received his B.S. degree from theUniversity of Chicago in 1957 and his M.D. degree fromHarvard Medical School. He was aHelen Hay Whitney Research Fellow[5] in the department of physics at Harvard and then at theMRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology[6] inCambridge, England, before joining the faculty of the department of biochemistry atStanford in 1963. In 1969 he moved toYale to become Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and in 1976, he returned to Stanford to head a new Department of Structural Biology.[2][7]
Stryder died in Stanford, California April 8, 2024, at the age of 86.[8]
Stryer and coworkers pioneered the use of fluorescence spectroscopy, particularlyFörster resonance energy transfer (FRET), to monitor the structure and dynamics of biological macromolecules.[9][10] In 1967, Stryer andHaugland showed that the efficiency of energy transfer depends on the inverse sixth power of the distance between the donor and acceptor,[11][12] as predicted by Förster's theory. They proposed that energy transfer can serve as a spectroscopic ruler to reveal proximity relationships in biological macromolecules.
A second contribution was Stryer's discovery of the primary stage of amplification in visual excitation.[13][14] Stryer, together with Fung and Hurley, showed that a single photoexcited rhodopsin molecule activates many molecules of transducin, which in turn activate many molecules of a cyclic GMP phosphodiesterase. Stryer's laboratory has also contributed to our understanding of the role of calcium in visual recovery and adaptation.[15][16][17]
Stryer participated in developing light-directed, spatially addressable parallel chemical synthesis for the synthesis of peptides and polynucleotides.[18][19][20] Light-directed combinatorial synthesis has been used byStephen Fodor and coworkers atAffymetrix to make DNA arrays containing millions of different sequences for genetic analyses.
From 1975, Stryer authored ten editions of the textbookBiochemistry.[21]
Stryer also chaired a National Research Council committee that produced a report entitledBio2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists.[22][23]
Tobias Meyer (postdoc), now professor, department of chemical and systems biology, Stanford University[33][34]
Cheng-Wen Wu (postdoc), former founding president of the TaiwanNational Health Research Institutes, 1996-2005, now professor at the Taiwan Medical College.
^Fodor, S.P.A., Pirrung, M.C., Read, J.L., and Stryer, L., Array of oligonucleotides on a solid substrate. U.S. Patent No. 5,445,934. Issued August 29, 1995
^Council, National Research; Studies, Division on Earth Life; Sciences, Board on Life; Century, Committee on Undergraduate Biology Education to Prepare Research Scientists for the 21st (2003).BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists - The National Academies Press.doi:10.17226/10497.ISBN978-0-309-08535-9.PMID20669482.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
