Interesting - you're digging up some really cool stuff, Mega!
There's a nice parallel here with the (otherwise entirely unrelated) dinoflagellate bioluminescent system. The dino luciferin turns out to be a modified version of chlorophyll, so there's another example where nature figured out a way to reuse an existing photoactive compound as a luciferin. And krill uses a very similar luciferin, which it cannot produce itself (since krill are not photosynthetic) but is thought to aquire through its food - presumably from eating dinoflagellates!
The paper you cited mentioned that "while the ultimate source of the coelenterazine in hydromedusae remains unknown, we believe that crustaceans are the most likely sources", and "the decapod shrimp Systellaspis debilis appears to have the ability to synthesize the molecule". So now the question becomes: can we find a GFP-like protein in these coelenterazine synthesizing shrimp?
On Saturday, December 22, 2012 1:07:11 AM UTC-8, Mega wrote:
The jellyfish seems not to make it's own coelenterazine...The inefficacy of coelenteramide indicates that the medusae are unable to recycle coelenterazine once it is used.http://www.pnas.org/content/98/20/11148.full
So either you don't need much, or, you they really have to eat much.
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