{"doi":"10.1101/2023.06.30.547126","title":"FruitFire: a luciferase based on a fruit fly metabolic enzyme","abstract":"Firefly luciferase is homologous to fatty acyl-CoA synthetases from insects that are not bioluminescent. Here, we determined the crystal structure of the fruit fly fatty acyl-CoA synthetase CG6178 to 2.5 Å. Based on this structure, we mutated a steric protrusion in the active site to create the artificial luciferase FruitFire, which prefers the synthetic luciferin CycLuc2 to d-luciferin by >1000-fold. FruitFire enabled in vivo bioluminescence imaging in the brains of mice using the pro-luciferin CycLuc2-amide. The conversion of a fruit fly enzyme into a luciferase capable of in vivo imaging underscores the potential for bioluminescence with a range of adenylating enzymes from nonluminescent organisms, and the possibilities for application-focused design of enzyme-substrate pairs.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2023,"id":409186,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.958,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":640425,"name":"Jacqueto Zephyr","orcid":"0000-0003-2388-9191","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":103673,"name":"Markus‐Frederik Bohn","orcid":"0000-0002-0369-1922","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":249895,"name":"Celia A. Schiffer","orcid":"0000-0003-2270-6613","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":139348,"name":"Stephen C. Miller","orcid":"0000-0001-7154-7757","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":139382,"name":"Spencer T. Adams","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":29,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:21:22.368387Z","pmid":"37425765","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}