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Exploring Biological Questions Through Organic Synthesis
By
Barbara Spector
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Anna K. Mapp '92 |
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Anna K. Mapp '92 is very busy these days. Mapp, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science and the Arts and an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry at Michigan's College of Pharmacy, is developing new synthetic molecules to study gene expression. She is also taking care of her first child, Eli, who was born in September.
Juggling research and motherhood "hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be," says Mapp, in a conversation interrupted occasionally by the cries of her infant son. One reason for the achievable balance, she notes, is the fact that she shares parenting duties with her husband, Adam J. Matzger, an organic-materials chemist who is also an assistant professor in Michigan's chemistry department.
The couple, who married as graduate students, joined the Michigan faculty in 2000. During her interviews for the position, "I was really impressed that the department was so committed to interdisciplinary work," Mapp recalls. "It seemed like a dynamic and exciting department."
Smaller Is Better
Mapp herself is contributing to that excitement. She and her colleagues have designed small molecules that function as artificial transcription factors, which regulate gene expression. Understanding the basic process of gene regulation is essential, she explains. "There is a growing correlation between diseases such as cancer and diabetes and how genes are regulated. We saw a need to make small molecules that could replace the process that carries out transcription," she says. Ultimately, such work could lead to the development of therapeutic agents for these diseases.
Small-molecule artificial transcription factors offer many advantages over larger molecules, Mapp explains. "With a small molecule, there is a better chance of having it just diffuse into the cell and go about its business," she says. Larger molecules like proteins are more likely to be degraded, she notes.
At the beginning of the project, "We did a lot of experiments with yeast," Mapp says. The results of those studies served as a design template, she notes. "By the time we made the small molecules, we felt very confident that it was going to work."
The process took about three years, she says. "We tried convoluted approaches first, but the straightforward one was the one that worked. The knowledge was out there — it just took some reading and experimentation to figure out that it could be straightforward to solve."
Mapp is also investigating rearrangement reactions as an approach for the formation of heterocycles and complex target molecules. She has received a Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Research Award from the March of Dimes, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund New Investigator Award in Toxicological Science and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997 and was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 1997 to 2000.
As a postdoc, Mapp collaborated on several papers with Lasker Award-winning molecular biologist Mark Ptashne. She refers to those projects as "an eye-opening experience" and attributes her interest in transcription to the influence of Ptashne's molecular-level thinking. "Before that," she says, "I was a synthetic organic chemist with not much interest in the biological world. I never would have worked with yeast or played with proteins."
Critical Thinking
In fact, Mapp, a native of Murfreesboro, Tenn., originally came to Bryn Mawr College with the intention of majoring in East Asian studies. "I didn't use the scientific method" in selecting a college, she says with a laugh. "I never visited Bryn Mawr before I went there. I knew of somebody 10 or 15 years older who had gone to Bryn Mawr. I looked at the brochure and saw that they had a good pre-med program and a burgeoning East Asian studies department."
But once she took Frank Mallory's organic chemistry class, she was hooked. "It was an epiphany — one of those life-changing experiences," she recalls. While a sophomore, she worked in the lab of former chemistry department chair Charles Swindell as a work-study student and grew more comfortable in a scientific setting. "I was able to learn things early and work with graduate students and postdocs," she says.
Mapp says her Bryn Mawr experience prepared her well for graduate school. "Bryn Mawr teaches you how to think critically and independently," she says. "That's what the Ph.D. is about."
As a young faculty member, she is enjoying the opportunity to watch her students develop those same skills. She notes that Michigan's chemistry graduate students impressed her from the outset — she had a chance to speak to some of them when she interviewed for her position. "They were very engaged in the department and their research."
Mapp says that mentoring students is "the best part" of a professor's job. "I just had my first two Ph.D. students graduate," she notes proudly. "It's fun to get to know their different personalities."
It's especially rewarding, she says, to watch students begin "turning the corner" and come to a real understanding of the science. "Then they're in the driver's seat."
Barbara Spector writes on science and technology as well as business topics. She is the editor-in-chief of Family Business magazine and former editor of The Scientist .
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