Department of Chemistry, University College London, 20 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0AJ, UK.
Chem Soc Rev. 2021 May 7;50(9):5668-5705. doi: 10.1039/d0cs01492c. Epub 2021 Mar 18.
Bioluminescence is the fascinating natural phenomenon by which living creatures produce light. Bioluminescence occurs when the oxidation of a small-molecule luciferin is catalysed by an enzyme luciferase to form an excited-state species that emits light. There are over 30 known bioluminescent systems but the luciferin-luciferase pairs of only 11 systems have been characterised to-date, whilst other novel systems are currently under investigation. The different luciferin-luciferase pairs have different light emission wavelengths and hence are suitable for various applications. The last decade or so has seen great advances in protein engineering, synthetic chemistry, and physics which have allowed luciferins and luciferases to reach previously uncharted applications. The bioluminescence reaction is now routinely used for gene assays, the detection of protein-protein interactions, high-throughput screening (HTS) in drug discovery, hygiene control, analysis of pollution in ecosystems and in vivo imaging in small mammals. Moving away from sensing and imaging, the more recent highlights of the applications of bioluminescence in biomedicine include the bioluminescence-induced photo-uncaging of small-molecules, bioluminescence based photodynamic therapy (PDT) and the use of bioluminescence to control neurons. There has also been an increase in blue-sky research such as the engineering of various light emitting plants. This has led to lots of exciting multidisciplinary science across various disciplines. This review focuses on the past, present, and future applications of bioluminescence. We aim to make this review accessible to all chemists to understand how these applications were developed and what they rely upon, in simple understandable terms for a graduate chemist.
生物发光是一种迷人的自然现象，生物通过这种现象产生光。当一种小分子荧光素被酶荧光素酶催化氧化，形成一个激发态物种并发出光时，就会发生生物发光。目前已知有 30 多种生物发光系统，但迄今为止只有 11 种系统的荧光素-荧光酶对已被描述，而其他新的系统目前正在研究中。不同的荧光素-荧光酶对具有不同的发光波长，因此适用于各种应用。在过去的十年左右，蛋白质工程、合成化学和物理学取得了重大进展，使荧光素和荧光酶能够应用于以前未知的领域。生物发光反应现在已被常规用于基因检测、蛋白质-蛋白质相互作用的检测、药物发现中的高通量筛选（HTS）、卫生控制、生态系统污染分析和小动物体内成像。除了传感和成像之外，生物发光在生物医学中的应用最近的亮点还包括小分子的生物发光诱导光解笼、基于生物发光的光动力疗法（PDT）和利用生物发光来控制神经元。此外，还有更多的蓝天研究，如各种发光植物的工程设计。这导致了跨学科的各种令人兴奋的多学科科学的发展。这篇综述重点介绍了生物发光的过去、现在和未来的应用。我们的目标是使所有化学家都能理解这些应用是如何开发的，以及它们所依赖的简单易懂的术语，以满足研究生化学家的需求。
