Re: [DIYbio] Re: Bioluminescent Goldfish?

I don't think you can even buy bacterial luciferin that easily.. the
usual "Luciferin" is firefly luciferin, a very different molecule.

You could probably supply tetradecanol (which is probably available as a
food additive) and trim your operon only to the bits needed to convert
it to tetradecanal.

I'm told by Harsh that you can use acetaldehyde as well, provided that
you add a long-chain molecule that can "fill the gap" in the active site
of luciferase to allow the enzyme to act upon acetaldehyde. But, it's
probably not worth the money/base pairs saved in removing the
tetradecanal (luciferin) synthase genes, because you'd have to keep
adding the acetaldehyde; the luciferin regeneration system that keeps
bioluminescence going in wild bacteria won't work for acetaldehyde.

Sometimes, the awesome things just require lots of DNA to work.
Bioluminescence is a make-and-break chemical cycle; you need enzymes for
both parts of the equation, and it adds up!

On 16/05/12 18:12, EJ wrote:
> Bear in mind that bioluminescence is not a single gene, but a bunch of
> them. The pVIB plasmid, which we use for bacteria transformation to get
> chemiluminescent bacteria, is over 10kb! You need the genes to make
> luciferin, the substrate, and the gene for luciferase, the enzyme. You
> could just use the luciferase gene but you would have to figure out a way
> to get luciferin into the fish- you can't just add it to the Petri dish as
> in a bacterial experiment. And it's not cheap.

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