Meeting Abstract
There are 13 known bioluminescent families in the phylum Annelida, including polychaetes and clitellates. Light emission through bioluminescence appears multiple times within the clade and is likely a convergent trait. In all instances, bioluminescence is produced through a chemical reaction involving the release of chemical energy in the form of light, following the oxidation of a substrate (small organic molecule generically called luciferin) catalyzed by an enzyme (luciferase). Luciferins are highly conserved whilst their associated luciferases are more variable. Luciferases isolated from bioluminescent organisms such as bacteria, coelenterates, and crustaceans have been commercialized for use in medicine, biotechnology, and environmental surveying. Some of these systems have limitations which could be ameliorated through the discovery of novel bioluminescent systems. The ever-increasing publicly available data set of annelid transcriptomes is an essential database for mining novel luciferases. Through a series of standardized bioinformatic approaches, a dataset of nearly 70 annelid transcriptomes have been assembled. This dataset is being mined for previously identified luciferases or their conserved domains to potentially identify novel bioluminescent systems. Parallel to the bioinformatic search tools, direct field observations are conducted to confirm bioluminescence in some annelid groups and potentially discover it in others. These results will shed light on the diversity of bioluminescent pathways as well as their evolutionary histories.
