Bioluminescence imaging

[9][10][11] The three main sources are the North American firefly, the sea pansy (and related marine organisms), and bacteria like Photorhabdus luminescens and Vibrio fischeri.

[15] Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have shown that bioluminescence imaging can be used to determine the effectiveness of cancer drugs that choke off a tumor's blood supply.

[16] The BLT inverse problem of 3D reconstruction of the distribution of bioluminescent molecules from data measured on the animal surface is inherently ill-posed.

The first small animal study using BLT was conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA in 2005.

A famous example is an autoluminograph published in Science magazine in 1986[18] of a glowing transgenic tobacco plant bearing the luciferase gene of fireflies placed on Kodak Ektachrome 200 film.