%0 Journal Article
%T Enhanced Beetle Luciferase for High-Resolution Bioluminescence Imaging
%A Yoshihiro Nakajima
%A Tomomi Yamazaki
%A Shigeaki Nishii
%A Takako Noguchi
%A Hideto Hoshino
%A Kazuki Niwa
%A Vadim R. Viviani
%A Yoshihiro Ohmiya
%J PLOS ONE
%D 2012
%I Public Library of Science (PLoS)
%R 10.1371/journal.pone.0010011
%X 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 ¦Á 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.
%U http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010011