The smallest natural high-active luciferase: Cloning and characterization of novel 16.5-kDa luciferase from copepod Metridia longa

• We describe cloning of the smallest 16.5-kDa luciferase from copepod Metridia longa.
• We describe expression of novel luciferase in insect cells and its purification.
• We report bioluminescent properties for high purity luciferase.
• The novel luciferase is highly active and extremely thermostable.
• The novel isoform is well suited as a bioluminescent reporter in mammalian cells.

Coelenterazine-dependent copepod luciferases containing natural signal peptide for secretion are a very convenient analytical tool as they enable monitoring of intracellular events with high sensitivity, without destroying cells or tissues. This property is well suited for application in biomedical research and development of cell-based assays for high throughput screening. We report the cloning of cDNA gene encoding a novel secreted non-allelic 16.5-kDa isoform (MLuc7) of Metridia longa luciferase, which, in fact, is the smallest natural luciferase of known for today. Despite the small size, isoform contains 10 conservative Cys residues suggesting the presence of up to 5 SS bonds. This hampers the efficient production of functionally active recombinant luciferase in bacterial expression systems. With the use of the baculovirus expression system, we produced substantial amounts of the proper folded MLuc7 luciferase with a yield of ∼3 mg/L of a high purity protein. We demonstrate that MLuc7 produced in insect cells is highly active and extremely thermostable, and is well suited as a secreted reporter when expressed in mammalian cells ensuring higher sensitivity of detection as compared to another Metridia luciferase isoform (MLuc164) which is widely employed in real-time imaging.