Bioluminescent insects have been the subject of scientific interest and popular wonder for millennia. But in 21st century, fireflies, click beetles, cave glow-worms that brighten our nights are threatened by an unprecedented competitor: anthropogenic light pollution. Artificial lights can obscure light-based signals on which these other bioluminescent organisms rely to court mates, deter predat...

Bioluminescence is a phenomena in an organism which produces luminescence on quorum sensing and this phenomenon has been explored in many fields like invivo diagnostics, marker technology, protein engineering etc. and has immense potential as future torchlight too with the aid of technologies. Present study aims at the screening and identification of bioluminescent bacteria from different marin...

We propose a digital spectral separation (DSS) system and methods to extract spectral information optimally from a weak multi-spectral signal such as in the bioluminescent imaging (BLI) studies. This system utilizes our newly invented spatially-translated spectral-image mixer (SSM), which consists of dichroic beam splitters, a mirror, and a DSS algorithm. The DSS approach overcomes the shortcom...

An improved bioluminescent assay of gentamicin in serum, based on the dose-dependent effect of the agent on the accumulation of extracellular ATP in Escherichia coli LU 14 cultures, is presented. The accuracy of the bioluminescent assay of gentamicin, expressed as the mean coefficient of variation over the therapeutic range, was 2.8%. Corresponding figures for an agar diffusion assay, a latex a...

As naval operations move into coastal waters, the possible impact of sporadic blooms of bioluminescent organisms on clandestine operations is of increasing concern. One such bloom­ forming light producer is the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi. This native-American comb jelly was first introduced into the Black Sea in 1982 where it caused the total collapse of the local fisheries. It has recently b...

To show, as a model system, that mycobacteria can express heterologous luciferase genes and that bioluminescence can be a rapid method of measuring antimycobacterial activity, a bioluminescent form of Mycobacterium smegmatis was made by transformation with a Mycobacterium-Escherichia coli shuttle vector containing the luxAB genes from Vibrio harveyi. The antimycobacterial effects of antibiotics...

The physical identity of the bioluminescent particles ('scintillons') extracted from the marine dinoflagellate Gonyaulax polyedra was investigated by electron microscopy and particle counts of the active fractions from sucrose density gradients. Membranous structures are abundantly present in purified fractions, while there is a decrease, relative to activity, in the numbers of guanine crystals...

A bioreporter was made containing a tfdRP(DII)-luxCDABE fusion in a modified mini-Tn5 construct. When it was introduced into the chromosome of Ralstonia eutropha JMP134, the resulting strain, JMP134-32, produced a sensitive bioluminescent response to 2, 4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) at concentrations of 2.0 microM to 5.0 mM. This response was linear (R(2) = 0.9825) in the range of 2.0 mi...