Mapping the structural dynamics of red- and blue-emitting beetle luciferases revealed by HDX-MS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beetle luciferases catalyze bioluminescent reactions using identical substrates—luciferin, ATP, and oxygen—yet emit colors ranging from green to red. As the luciferase fold is highly conserved, the structural basis of this spectral diversity remains elusive. Hydrogen/deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) was used to systematically probe the conformational dynamics of green-emitting Amydetes vivianii luciferase (GB Av ) and red-emitting Phrixothrix hirtus luciferase (RE Ph ), along with their color-shifting mutants, R337L and L334R, respectively. HDX-MS profiling in the apo and ligand-bound states mapped dynamic changes associated with substrate binding and color modulation. RE Ph and the red-shifted R337L GB Av mutant exhibited globally higher dynamics, particularly in N-terminal domain peptides surrounding the active site, than their blue-green-emitting counterparts. Substrate binding reduced deuterium uptake in all enzymes; however, red-emitting forms retained greater flexibility. These findings establish a direct link between structural dynamics and bioluminescence color tuning in beetle luciferases, providing mechanistic insight into spectral control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".