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Beyond D-luciferin: expanding the scope of bioluminescence imaging in vivo
Spencer T Adams1, Stephen C Miller1
1Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA 01605, USA.
Current Opinion in Chemical Biology
|August 1, 2014
Abstract:
The light-emitting chemical reaction catalyzed by the enzyme firefly luciferase is widely used for noninvasive imaging in live mice. However, photon emission from the luciferase is crucially dependent on the chemical properties of its substrate, D-luciferin. In this review, we describe recent work to replace the natural luciferase substrate with synthetic analogs that extend the scope of bioluminescence imaging.
