Fireflies glow because an enzyme called luciferase eats up ATP and reacts with a chemical called D-luciferin to produce light! Luciferase can be created by modified bacteria, but until now D-luciferin has been very expensive to produce. This paper reports a new one-pot synthesis that’s cheap, effective and easy to do!
D-luciferin + luciferase (ATP, Mg2+, O2) -> oxyluciferin + light!
The reaction has a high quantum efficiency, the wavelength can be tuned by changing the enzyme slightly and it’s not sensitive to external light (not a fluorescence!)
in vivo imaging??
existing syntheses, which i don’t pretend to understand, rely on high temperatures and hazardous chemicals :(
ah okay, L-luciferin is an enantomer which this team managed to produce in a 1:1 mixture of just two chemicals at room temp. it was super easy.
they do a lot of organic chemistry that i don’t understand.
it’s interesting to me that they go “a possible mechanism is” i guess i expected them to be much more certain about it. no idea how they verify this stuff. it looks like they try making the chemicals along different steps of their proposed pathway and seeing if it goes the rest of the way like they said? oh and they detect secondary products.
god this all sounds maddeningly complicated to do! im in awe.
so they worked out this mechanism, and then went “oh hey we can do this all in one pot” and then did that. nifty!
damn. this is a really important synthesis! woah!
yay! h1 nmr done to see what they had made. also silica gel column chromatography to extract the right enantomer. i understand those bits at least. oooh this also did tof mass spec, and put the stuff through a polarimeter to measure how much it rotated light.
haha, the recipes at the end are so in-depth wow. you could do this! they really tell you how.
my takeaways:
- gosh organic chemistry is complicated!
- i love that the whole-ass recipe is provided at the end, that’s so cool!
- really important synthesis!!!
- yay nmr