Dr. Mafu’s research focuses on metabolites of plants, in particular terpenes. Terpenes are a major component of resin, give their strong smell to essential oils, and are responsible for the taste of hops in beer.

Dr. Mafu earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology from Iowa State University and held postdoctoral fellowships at ISU and the University of California, Davis. She joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 2017.

During cell division, two new daughter cells are formed. Each daughter cell must contain a full set of chromosomes (i.e. all the genetic information). This is accomplished by duplicating each chromosome and then segregating (sorting) one copy to each side of the cell. Then the middle of the cell pinches closed, so that each half of the mother cell will become one daughter. A critical part of segregating the chromosomes is the mitotic spindle, a collection of fibers (microtubules) that attach on one end to a pole of the cell and on the other to a chromosome. Once the microtubules have hold of all the chromosomes, the spindle will pull them apart. If segregation doesn’t happen correctly, the daughter cell will likely die. Thus, interfering with the mitotic spindle is an attractive candidate for cancer therapy.

Paclitaxel (brand name: Taxol) is a commonly used chemotherapeutic in ovarian cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, and others. It was originally isolated from the yew tree in the early 1970s, and has been shown to bind microtubules and make them overly-stable — which prevents them from shortening and pulling the chromosomes apart.

In a recent paper, Dr. Mafu and her postdoctoral lab investigated a similarly promising chemotherapeutic compound: pseudolaric acid B (PAB), which comes from golden larch root. The golden larch tree has been used in Chinese medicine for millennia and isolated PAB has been shown to have potent anti-cancer effectiveness. Specifically, it blocks microtubule growth. However, PAB is hard to extract from golden larch roots.

Dr. Mafu and colleagues investigated the pathway that produces PAB, in order to better understand how to you might make it in the lab. They discovered a new enzyme that seems likely to play an early step in the synthesis of PAB and showed that they could transfer this enzyme into yeast and it still worked. This provides easier-to-work-with tools for studying the rest of the PAB synthesis pathway, as well as giving hope that we may eventually be able to grow engineered yeast that make lots and lots of PAB (or something very similar) for chemotherapy.