Luciferase of the Japanese syllid polychaete Odontosyllis umdecimdonta

1Odontosyllis undecimdonta is a marine syllid polychaete that produces bright internal and exuded bioluminescence. Despite over fifty years of biochemical investigation into Odontosyllis bioluminescence, the light-emitting small molecule substrate and catalyzing luciferase protein have remained a mystery. Here we describe the discovery of a bioluminescent protein fraction from O. undecimdonta, the identification of the luciferase using peptide and RNA sequencing, and the in vitro reconstruction of the bioluminescence reaction using highly purified O. undecimdonta luciferin and recombinant luciferase. Lastly, we found no identifiably homologous proteins in publicly available datasets. This suggests that the syllid polychaetes contain an evolutionarily unique luciferase among all characterized luminous taxa.\n\n3 HighlightsO_LIThe polychaete O. undecimdonta uses a luciferin-luciferase bioluminescence system\nC_LIO_LIO. undecimdonta bioluminescence does not require additional cofactors\nC_LIO_LIThe luciferase of the Japanese fireworm is 329 amino acids long\nC_LIO_LIRecombinant luciferase is not secreted when expressed in human cells\nC_LIO_LIExogenous luciferin does not seem to penetrate cell membranes-only lysate luminesces\nC_LIO_LIThe luciferase transcript is supported by full-length cDNA reads with 5 and 3 UTR\nC_LI\n\n\n\nO_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=80 SRC=\"FIGDIR/small/329631_ufig1.gif\" ALT=\"Figure 1\">\nView larger version (25K):\norg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@15882beorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1efc214org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1aee561org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@15582b7_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG