Team:Cambridge/Bioluminescence/Bacterial Luciferases

An agar plate with bioluminescent bacteria.

Project Vibrio was designed to complement Project Firefly, by using bacterial lux operons to do what had been impossible with firefly luciferases:

• Emission of blue light to complete our spectrum of emission wavelengths.
• Substrate production within E. coli, avoiding the need for addition of external substrates, such as luciferin.

Lux operons are found in the genomes of a range of natural bioluminescent bacteria and encode five enzymes involved in the light-generating pathway.

• luxA and luxB form the luciferase of the system, which causes the emission of light when acting on the substrate tetradecanal.
• luxC, luxD and luxE are involved in the biosynthesis of tetradecanal from readily available substrates.

In nature, the lux genes appear to be repressed by the nucleoid protein, H-NS, and occur under quorum sensing control.

Our work

James Slock from Kings College?? kindly provided us with a plasmid containing the lux operon from the bacterium Vibrio fischeri.