A pocketful of colour

Joshua Finkelstein

Nature, 2006, vol. 440, issue 7082, 285-285

Abstract: Flying Colours Fireflies communicate using coloured light that is emitted when an electronically excited oxyluciferin species — made by the enzyme luciferase — relaxes to its groundstate. Point mutants of the enzyme can dramatically alter the colour of this ‘bioluminescence’, and though the luciferase X-ray crystal structure has been solved previously, the exact nature of this colour change had eluded biologists. Nakatsu et al. have now solved the X-ray structures of luciferase in several different states, and identify a specific conformational change in an isoleucine residue as the trigger for changes in bioluminescence colour.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/440285a Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:440:y:2006:i:7082:d:10.1038_440285a

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/440285a

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().