Bioluminescent Proteins: High Sensitive Optical Reporters for Imaging Protein-Protein Interactions and Protein Foldings in Living Animals

Bioluminescence is the production and emission of light by a living organism. Bioluminescence imaging was developed over the last decade as a tool for studying biological processes in living small laboratory animals by molecular imaging. The bioluminescence-based optical imaging is highly sensitive, low-cost, and non-invasive, enabling the real-time analysis of disease processes within the cell at a molecular level in living animals. Recent advances in protein complementation strategies have further expanded its applications by quantitatively monitoring several sub-cellular processes such as protein-protein interactions, protein dimerizations, and protein foldings. In this chapter, we provide a brief introduction to bioluminescence imaging technology and discuss its applications in studying protein-protein interactions, protein dimerizations, and protein foldings, which are some of the most important cellular processes that occur in the heart signal transduction network within the cells, by non-invasively imaging living animals.