Chemiluminescence and Bioluminescence Imaging for Biosensing and Therapy: and Perspectives.

Chemiluminescence (CL) and bioluminescence (BL) imaging technologies, which require no external light source so as to avoid the photobleaching, background interference and autoluminescence, have become powerful tools in biochemical analysis and biomedical science with the development of advanced imaging equipment. CL imaging technology has been widely applied to high-throughput detection of a variety of analytes because of its high sensitivity, high efficiency and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Using luciferase and fluorescent proteins as reporters, various BL imaging systems have been developed innovatively for real-time monitoring of diverse molecules based on the reaction between luciferin and the substrate. Meanwhile, the kinetics of protein interactions even in deep tissues has been studied by BL imaging. In this review, we summarize and applications of CL and BL imaging for biosensing and therapy. We first focus on CL imaging from the view of improving the sensitivity. Then, CL applications in cells and tissues based on different CL systems are demonstrated. Subsequently, the recent and applications of BL imaging are summarized. Finally, we provide the insight into the development trends and future perspectives of CL and BL imaging technologies.