How Can Fireflies Help Doctors Study Heart Disease?

Conditions that cause oxygen deprivation in the heart, like angina, coronary heart disease and cardiac surgery, prevent enough ATP being made in heart cells. ATP is the ready energy currency in the cell and, without it, even the most basic processes go haywire. When the blood flow to the heart is restored when the heart starts to work normally again, mitochondria can change from being energy providers to killers that cause irreversible damage.

Researchers at Bristol in the UK are trying to find out why mitochondria switch from being good guys to bad guys. The scientists reasoned that being able to directly measure ATP levels inside mitochondria of living heart cells in real time would be a great advantage and they have developed a way to do this using the protein luciferase that makes the tails of fireflies light up.

Using molecular biological techniques, they transferred modified forms of the luciferase DNA into heart cells ~ the cells could then make their own luciferase inside their mitochondria. Since luciferase lights up in the presence of ATP, the amount of light, and hence the amount of ATP, could be detected using a microscope and a highly sensitive camera.

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