Education - Bioluminescence

Bioluminescence

Bioluminescence is the emission of visible light from living organisms. It is found in a wide range of terrestrial and marine organisms, including fireflies and glow-worms, fungi, bacteria, jelly-fish, shellfish, shrimp, starfish, squid, and fish.

The light is caused by a chemical reaction - chemiluminescence - that is catalysed by a protein luciferase which enables the luciferin to react with oxygen.

The luciferin is different in each group of organisms. The ability to detect, with exquisite sensitivity, these chemiluminescence reactions has lead to a wide range of applications in biomedical research, drug discovery and clinical diagnosis, in billion dollar markets. Professor Campbell at the University of Wales College of Medicine, now Cardiff University, has been a pioneer in the exploitation of chemi- and bio-luminescence for over 35 years. With colleagues, he developed a chemiluminescent probe, originally invented as a model for the light emitting reaction in a luminous jelly-fish, as a replacement for radioactivity in immunoassay. This technology is now used in over 100 million clinical tests per year, and resulted in the award of the Queen's Anniversary Prize to the Medical College in Cardiff in 1998. It was selected by the Eureka project of Universities UK in 2006 as one of the top 100 inventions and discoveries from UK Universities in the last 50 years.