Welcome to the future of bioluminescence

It’s time your assays started working harder for you. Free yourself from the need for fluorescent excitation or bioluminescent luciferin treatment. Autobioluminescence scavenges small amounts of intracellular chemicals to make and recycle luciferin so cells can autonomously and repeatedly turn on or off light production, or continuously modulate light intensity to report real-time viability/metabolic activity.

How It Works

In a traditional bioluminescent reaction, the cell produces the luciferase and the metabolic power to support the reaction. The user must lyse the cell to release these components and apply a chemically synthesized luciferin. This results in the death of the cells under study and produces only a single time point of information.

490 BioTech’s autobioluminescent technology bypasses the need for cellular destruction and luciferin treatment by enabling the cell to assemble and recycle the luciferin component from cytosolically available components. This allows cells to produce light continuously, or to autonomously turn on or off light production without any external intervention. Data is provided continuously and the cells remain unperturbed so they can be assayed repeatedly or used for further experimentation.

Autobioluminescence has been optimized so that only cytosolic components are used, and only at a level that does not impact native physiology. This allows autobioluminescent cells to remain physiologically identical to wild-type, non-luminescent cells so you can be confident the data you get will be reliable and actionable.