Enhanced beetle luciferase for high-resolution bioluminescence imaging.

We developed an enhanced green-emitting luciferase (ELuc) to be used as a bioluminescence imaging (BLI) probe. ELuc exhibits a light signal in mammalian cells that is over 10-fold stronger than that of the firefly luciferase (FLuc), which is the most widely used luciferase reporter gene. We showed t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yoshihiro Nakajima, Tomomi Yamazaki, Shigeaki Nishii, Takako Noguchi, Hideto Hoshino, Kazuki Niwa, Vadim R Viviani, Yoshihiro Ohmiya
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2010-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC2848861?pdf=render
Description
Summary:We developed an enhanced green-emitting luciferase (ELuc) to be used as a bioluminescence imaging (BLI) probe. ELuc exhibits a light signal in mammalian cells that is over 10-fold stronger than that of the firefly luciferase (FLuc), which is the most widely used luciferase reporter gene. We showed that ELuc produces a strong light signal in primary cells and tissues and that it enables the visualization of gene expression with high temporal resolution at the single-cell level. Moreover, we successfully imaged the nucleocytoplasmic shuttling of importin alpha by fusing ELuc at the intracellular level. These results demonstrate that the use of ELuc allows a BLI spatiotemporal resolution far greater than that provided by FLuc.
ISSN:1932-6203