Maria Manifava
Cell biologist in Nicholas Ktistakis's group at the Babraham Institute whose live-cell imaging work spans more than two decades of research on lipid signalling, autophagosome formation and mTORC1
Ktistakis Group, Signalling Programme, Babraham Institute (papers 2001–2026)
Maria Manifava was first author of the 2016 eLife study (MAN2016) that filmed mTORC1, the growth-control complex, in living human cells as amino acids were added back after starvation. mTORC1 arrived on lysosomes, the cell's recycling compartments, within about 2 minutes and peaked by 5 minutes, in step with the amino acid leucine reaching the inside of the lysosomes. The chemical marks that mTORC1 places on its usual target proteins appeared later. The authors suggested that mTORC1 makes a short stop at the lysosome to be switched on and then acts on its targets elsewhere in the cell. Timing like this is hard to see with methods that only take snapshots, which is why live imaging mattered here. The work was done in cultured cells.
Manifava has published with Nicholas Ktistakis at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge since at least 2001, when PubMed lists a paper on the lipid-binding FYVE-domain proteins FENS-1 and DFCP1. DFCP1 became central to a 2008 study in the Journal of Cell Biology, on which Manifava is a co-author, that described the omegasome: a membrane platform rich in the lipid phosphatidylinositol 3-phosphate, connected to the endoplasmic reticulum, from which autophagosomes grow. The group's most recent paper, in Nature Communications in 2026 with Roger Williams's group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, describes a positive feedback loop between GABARAP and the PI3-kinase complex that helps autophagosome membranes expand quickly.
PubMed still lists Manifava in the Signalling Programme at the Babraham Institute on the 2026 paper. No personal page was found, so the exact job title is not shown.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | M | Dynamics of mTORC1 activation in response to amino acids MAN2016 First author: imaged living human cells to show that mTORC1 reaches lysosomes within 2 minutes of amino acid addition and acts on its targets after it leaves. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 2
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Maria Manifava.
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- Nicholas T. Ktistakis Uses live imaging to follow the first minutes of autophagy and of mTORC1 activation
- Roberto Zoncu Showed as a postdoc that mTORC1 senses amino acids from inside the lysosome, through the v-ATPase and Ragulator. His Berkeley lab has since mapped how the Rag GTPases and the folliculin complex switch mTORC1 on, and how lysosomal cholesterol feeds into the same system
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