Team:NTHU Formosa/Bioluminescence
Bioluminescence
1. What is bioluminescence?
Bioluminescence is found in living organism. It’s light produced by chemical reaction in which luciferase catalyzed substrates and result in the emission of light.
2. Bioluminescence vs. Fluorescence
Bioluminescence results from chemical reaction which convert chemical energy to light energy. About 20% of the converted energy is released in the form of heat.
Fluorescence is radiation emission, usually visible light. It occurs when the excited orbital electrons fall back to ground state and release the energy as light and heat.
3. About luciferase
Since 1986, the discoveries of bioluminescence, the firefly luciferase, Renilla luciferase and NanoLuc luciferase, are nonstop. The firefly Luciferase has been widely used as sensor target after successfully cloned. Alternate bioluminescent reporter systems like these are the most common bioluminescence assays, which induce bioluminescence by substrates. The bioluminescence we use in our project is the codon-optimized self-directed bacterial luciferase gene cassette (lux). Lux is very unique among the present bioluminescence systems due to its ability to retrieves intercellular components to synthesize all substrates needed for its production of light.