Bioluminescence

[waltky]

Harnessing bioluminescence...

The light fantastic: Harnessing Nature's glow
23 January 2013 - Bioluminescence describes the light that some living creatures such as fireflies and jellyfish emit from their cells. Harnessing these reactions has already transformed key areas of clinical diagnosis and medical research.

But scientists are now looking at whether this "living light" could help enhance food crops, detect pollution or even illuminate our journeys home. On a night in January 1832, off the coast of Tenerife, a young Charles Darwin wandered up on to the deck of the HMS Beagle. As the young naturalist looked out to sea, he was struck by the unearthly glow emanating from the ocean. "The sea was luminous in specks and in the wake of the vessel, of a uniform, slightly milky colour," he wrote. "When the water was put into a bottle, it gave out sparks for some minutes after having been drawn up." Darwin was almost certainly describing the glow emitted by tiny marine organisms called dinoflagellates. His accounts of this phenomenon, known as bioluminescence, were unearthed by Prof Anthony Campbell in hand-written notebooks stored at Cambridge University.

While Darwin was one of the first modern scientists to document the phenomenon, it would be more than a century before it was put to practical use. Prof Campbell, from Cardiff University, carried out pioneering research throughout the 1970s and 1980s leading to the discovery that living creatures produce this light using special proteins called luciferases. The proteins take part in a chemical reaction in the cells, which is responsible for the light emission. "When I started researching bioluminescence 40 years ago at the [Cardiff University] medical school, a lot of people raised their eyebrows and said: 'What the devil is this guy doing working on animals in the sea? He was brought from Cambridge to do medical research'," Prof Campbell explains.

Huge market

But he was able to spot the phenomenon's potential. Having discovered the proteins involved in bioluminescence, he realised that by combining luciferases with other molecules, it was possible to harness this light emission to measure biological processes. This would pave the way for something of a revolution in medical research and clinical diagnosis.

For example, by attaching a luminescent protein to an antibody - a protective molecule produced by the body's immune system - it could be used to diagnose disease. This allowed clinicians to dispense with the radioactive markers that had previously been used in such tests. "This market is now worth about £20bn. If you go into a hospital and have a blood test which measures viral proteins, cancer proteins, hormones, vitamins, bacterial proteins, drugs, it will almost certainly use this technique," Prof Campbell told BBC News.

Bioluminescent proteins are also tools in drug discovery and have found widespread applications in biomedical research, where they are used to study biological processes in live cells. "If you've got a university department that doesn't use these techniques, they are not at the cutting edge," says Campbell.

Contamination problem

 

[spletkos]

We shall see how bright will be our future...