![]() The luciferin for firefly luciferase, D-luciferin, is water soluble and can be topically applied to whole plants or delivered through watering ( Rellán-Álvarez et al., 2015). Some luciferins, such as coelenterazine – the substrate for Renilla luciferase – are non-water soluble and cannot be used for imaging without cell-lysis ( Wend et al., 2013). One major challenge is uniform delivery and penetration of the luciferin substrate, especially in adult plant tissues. However, current bioluminescent reporters do present some significant challenges, which has limited their broad application for macro scale visualization of gene expression. These reporters have a high signal to noise ratio because plants produce effectively no background bioluminescence signal.Īdditionally, thanks to its water-soluble luciferin substrate, firefly luciferase can be used to visualize dynamic changes in gene expression in plants in a non-invasive manner, theoretically enabling whole-plant time lapse imaging ( Khakhar et al., 2018). Researchers have leveraged some enzymes, such as the firefly and Renilla luciferases, to build reporters to study gene expression in plants and other eukaryotic systems ( Khakhar et al., 2018 Wend et al., 2013). Several different luciferin substrate-luciferase enzyme pairs have been described to date ( Oba et al., 2017 Schultz et al., 2018). The mechanism of light emission is broadly conserved: an enzymatic oxidation reaction by a luciferase enzyme turns a luciferin substrate into a high energy intermediate, which decays to produce light ( Shimomura, 2006). Introductionīioluminescence is used by a diverse set of organisms to achieve a broad range of goals, such as attracting mates, scaring off predators and recruiting other creatures to spread spores ( Shimomura, 2006 Wainwright and Longo, 2017 Verdes and Gruber, 2017 Labella et al., 2017 Oliveira et al., 2015). This could have many uses including helping plants attract insects to pollinate flowers and building plant biosensors that emit light in response to environmental signals. propose that the toolkit developed in this work could be used to generate plants with luminescence that can be switched on or off as desired. Further experiments showed that the fungal bioluminescence pathway can be used to build reporters that monitor the activity of plant genes throughout living tissues and over a period of several days as well as examine the response to plant hormones.Īlongside studying the activities of genes in plants, Khakhar et al. Inserting the same genes into several other plant species, including tomatoes and dahlias, produced similar results. The experiments found that this was sufficient to turn caffeic acid into molecules of luciferin which are able to produce light. have inserted the genes that encode the enzymes of the fungal bioluminescence pathway into tobacco plants. Caffeic acid is a common molecule in plants, therefore, it is possible the fungal bioluminescence pathway could be used to build reporters that produce light without needing the addition of chemicals. Recently, it has been discovered that fungi have a bioluminescence pathway that converts a molecule known as caffeic acid into luciferin. These chemicals tend to be expensive and may not penetrate evenly into the tissues of interest, limiting the potential applications of the reporters in research studies. ![]() ![]() However, these reporters often require chemicals to be added to the tissues to produce light. Scientists have identified the enzymes that drive several of these systems and used them to build reporters that can study the activity of genes in the tissues of plants and other lifeforms over space and time. For example, an enzyme known as luciferase in fireflies produces light by acting on a molecule called luciferin. Many animals have evolved the capacity to produce light from chemical reactions.
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