Enhanced beetle luciferase for high-resolution bioluminescence imaging.

We developed an enhanced green-emitting luciferase (ELuc) to be used as a bioluminescence imaging (BLI) probe. ELuc exhibits a light signal in mammalian cells that is over 10-fold stronger than that of the firefly luciferase (FLuc), which is the most widely used luciferase reporter gene. We showed that ELuc produces a strong light signal in primary cells and tissues and that it enables the visualization of gene expression with high temporal resolution at the single-cell level. Moreover, we successfully imaged the nucleocytoplasmic shuttling of importin alpha by fusing ELuc at the intracellular level. These results demonstrate that the use of ELuc allows a BLI spatiotemporal resolution far greater than that provided by FLuc.