Light Output

Increasing Light Emission

• Paper on isolation of G-LRE and H-LRE, which lists previous attempts to improve light production
• Intensified light emission in presence of low ATP concentration by PPDK
• Enhanced luciferase activity through cytodine nucleotides
• Gene chimerisation to improve practical usefulness of firefly luciferase
• Genetically modified firefly luciferase - the EPIC luciferase
• Bioluminescence Spectra of Native and Mutant Firefly Luciferases as a Function of pH

Relevant Physics

• The Candela measures how much light perceivable to the human eye is being emitted by a source of radiation, the Luminous Intensity (or luminous flux. It is related to Radiant intensity (or radiant flux) (which is measured in watts per steradian) but has been weighted by a Luminosity function. This alters the power output so that it is proportional to the sensitivity of the human eye: Definition of the candela with respect to Radiant intensity. Therefore, an object which is black may be emitting a lot of radiation (measured in watts per steradian) but since it is not perceivable to the human eye it is emitting 0cd of radiation.
• The lumen is simply cd*sr. It is thus the analogue to the Watt

• The Lux measures how much light is incident on a suface, the Illuminance. It is related to irradiance (measured in Watts per m^2) but has been weighted again by the luminosity function. 1lux=1cd/m^2
• The luminance of an object is how much light is emitted from it. This is also measured in Lux, but it is different contextually.

• A table of ambient illuminances. For our glowing bacteria to be seen from a given distance, they must be at least 1/20th of this value.

• A brief summary of the different luminous measures

• A site containing luminosity functions

• To summarise, the luminosity function allows one to convert between radiant energy and luminous (i.e., visible) energy.

Human Vision