Eh, 10 luciferase genes is nothing. In dinoflagellates, the luciferase genes are known to occur in very long tandem repeat regions. Estimates are that P. lunula has at least 200 luciferase genes in a row (Okamoto 2001)! And each luciferase gene itself consists of three copies of the catalytic domain, each of which seems to be catalytically active on its own. It's not known why they have so many copies, but this propensity to gene duplication may be why dinoflagellates tend to have such huge genomes - 60x the size of the human genome!
The comb jelly that was sequenced has a much smaller genome (155 MB, about 1/20th the size of the human genome). The paper does say the luciferases occur in two genomic clusters, comprising three different sequence similarity groups.
Multicellular eukaryotic organisms are quite a bit more complex than bacteria, and it is not unusual to have multiple copies of a gene, each of which may play a slightly different role depending on where and when it is being expressed. In addition, these organisms put up quite an interesting visual display with both bioluminescence and moving light diffraction patterns (if you're ever in California, go check out the jellyfish exhibit in the Monterey Aquarium!). And they also seem to have multiple light receptor genes - the opsins mentioned in the title - so I wouldn't be surprised if they had liciferases that emitted light at slightly different wavelength, and that they used these to communicate.
On Monday, December 24, 2012 6:07:49 AM UTC-8, Mega wrote:
How can one beast have ten luciferase genes?--
As for the luciferin, the modified GFP may be a shortcut in a metabolic pathway which slowly does the same?
But now that there were no GFP homologues found... strange...
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