Luciferases can be broadly classified by their substrates: firefly (fLuc) and other beetle luciferases oxidize D-luciferin, whereas Renilla luciferase (rLuc), Gaussia luciferase (gLuc), and NanoLuc (NLuc) oxidize coelenterazine or its analogues ( Table 1). Luciferase enzymes oxidize a substrate to produce light and CO 2. A growing list of viruses have been engineered to express luciferase and exploit this technology ( Table 1), enabling rapid measures of viral load over time (i.e., longitudinal measurements), tissue distribution, interhost transmission, and the impact of therapeutic treatments in animal models. BLI detects light produced by luciferase enzymes. The power of these traditional approaches can be complemented, and many of these limitations overcome, by using in vivo bioluminescence imaging (BLI) ( Fig 1). Moreover, inherent animal-to-animal variability introduces significant confounding effects, resulting in studies that require hundreds of animals to acquire statistical significance. This produces static snapshots of replication only at specific times and specific sites within the animal. Cohorts of animals are infected and euthanized, and viral load or immune responses are measured in predetermined tissues. Despite their utility, animal models have been constrained by the inability to monitor viral replication dynamics in real time. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.Īnimal models are invaluable in studying viral replication in vivo, the pathogenesis of viral infection, the host immune response, and the efficacy of antiviral interventions. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedįunding: Work in the Mehle lab described here is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R00GM088484), the American Lung Association (RG-310016), a Wisconsin Partnership Education and Research Committee New Investigator Program grant (grant 2563), and a Shaw scientist award. Spindler, University of Michigan Medical School, UNITED STATESĬopyright: © 2015 Andrew Mehle. Citation: Mehle A (2015) Fiat Luc: Bioluminescence Imaging Reveals In Vivo Viral Replication Dynamics.
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