Wood K V, Lam Y A, McElroy W D, Seliger H H
Department of Chemistry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla 92093.
J Biolumin Chemilumin. 1989 Jul;4(1):31-9. doi: 10.1002/bio.1170040110.
In studying beetle bioluminescence in the early 1960s, Dr. McElroy and his colleagues found that the Jamaican click beetle, Pyrophorus plagiophthalamus, was capable of emitting different colours of light. They further found that the luciferin substrate used by this beetle was the same as that in the firefly, demonstrating that the different colours of bioluminescence were due to differences in the structure of the luciferases. We have recently cloned cDNAs from this beetle species which code for at least four different luciferases. The luciferases are distinguishable by their different colours of bioluminescence when expressed in Escherichia coli. The sequence differences between these different luciferases are few, so the amino acids responsible for the different colours of emission must also be few. Through the construction of hybrid luciferases, by rearranging fragments of the original cDNA clones, we have identified some of these amino acid determinants of colour.
20世纪60年代初，在研究甲虫生物发光时，麦克尔罗伊博士及其同事发现，牙买加叩头虫（Pyrophorus plagiophthalamus）能够发出不同颜色的光。他们进一步发现，这种甲虫使用的荧光素底物与萤火虫的相同，这表明生物发光的不同颜色是由于荧光素酶结构的差异。我们最近从这种甲虫物种中克隆了cDNA，这些cDNA编码至少四种不同的荧光素酶。当在大肠杆菌中表达时，这些荧光素酶可通过其不同颜色的生物发光来区分。这些不同荧光素酶之间的序列差异很少，因此导致不同发射颜色的氨基酸也必定很少。通过构建杂交荧光素酶，重新排列原始cDNA克隆的片段，我们已经确定了一些颜色的氨基酸决定因素。
