With limited funding, researchers often find themselves doing more in the laboratory than necessary, making their own buffers, stock solutions and assays. However, there is an opportunity cost involved in this approach. For instance, by doing this, you lose valuable time to perform other research projects and you lose efficiency to generate more data.

In addition, when performing luciferase assays without a premade kit, you risk inconsistency and irreproducibility of your experiments, affecting reliability of your data.

If you have been thinking about whether the luciferase assay kits are really worth it, this article is for you. Here, we highlight kit benefits to help you decide.


Some Benefits of Luciferase Assay Kits

To perform biological replicates at different times, you must make sure that your buffers and reagents have similar quality, high sensitivity, and consistent performance. Otherwise, these materials will decrease reliability of your data, affect your signal measurements, and cause high variation in your experimental data. To minimize these issues, consider some advantages of using luciferase kits and switch to the kits.

Quality – Lot-to-Lot, Your Assay Maintains the Same High-Quality

Below are some reasons why using luciferase assay kits is going to be better for your assays overall:

  • Scaled production of the kits means lot-to-lot consistency. This means that from one assay to the next, you’re truly conducting your experiments with similar quality of reagents.
  • Reducing the possibility of errors by minimizing the preparation of buffers and pipetting of reagents.
  • Reducing the possibility of cross-contamination ruining results. Whereas, when you’re working with multiple chemicals, especially shared materials, there is a risk of contamination.

Some additional benefits of using GoldBio’s luciferase assay kits:

  • The luciferase kits use GoldBio’s luciferin, which is known for its purity (over 99%), and is trusted in university Imaging Cores.
  • GoldBio’s luciferase assay kits are affordable.

Easy and Fast – An Easy Protocol That Saves Time

The protocol for GoldBio’s luciferase assay kits is relatively simple, and fast.

Below is an overview of the steps to perform the luciferase assay:

1. Preparation of samples (including preparing luciferase lysis buffer, adding the lysis buffer onto the cells, incubating and transferring the cell lysate into a single tube or a multiwell plate).

2. Preparing the working solution of a bioluminescent reagent.

3. Adding the bioluminescent reagent into the cell lysate

4. Measuring the luciferase activity.


luciferase assay overview

Convenient – Everything You Need, All In One Kit

Luciferase assay kits include all the reagents you need to perform your assays, such as lysis or lyophilized buffers, luciferase assay buffers, and luciferin. That means you’re not hunting around the lab, making stock solutions, or spending extra time preparing the assay. The convenience of the kit saves a lot of time, especially in large-scale situations.

Longer Stability – Your Signal Won’t Fade Too Fast

If you have many samples, choose the high-throughput screening luciferase assay system (glow assay). The advantage of this kit is the half-life of the working solution is 3 hours. Therefore, you have more flexibility when preparing and pipetting your materials into the wells, without worrying that your signal may fade.

High-throughput – Get Large-Scaled Imaging Done Quicker

The HTS luciferase assay system only requires few steps—preparing the working solution, adding it to your samples, and reading the signal—so it minimizes handling steps and pipetting errors.


How to Choose a Luciferase Assay Kit

When browsing for your kit, you’ll notice a variety of luciferase assay kits. There are different types of luciferase assays, such as a flash assay, a glow assay, a single tube assay, a multiwell plate assay, a single assay (Renilla luciferase assay or firefly luciferase assay), or a dual luciferase assay. So, you can get overwhelmed with different options of the kits.

To start, if you need a kit for a single assay, choose a kit based on the bioluminescent reagent: coelenterazine for Renilla luciferase assay, or D-luciferin for firefly luciferase assay.

However, if you need a kit for a dual luciferase assay, choose the Illumination™ Firefly & Renilla Luciferase Enhanced Assay kit, which has both coelenterazine and D-luciferin.

More information about these different types of assays can be found in our Luciferase Assay Crash Course article. This article also covers how the assay works, the equipment to use, and so much more.

 

References

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Brasier, A. R., & Ron, D. (1992, January 1). [34] Luciferase reporter gene assay in mammalian cells. ScienceDirect; Academic Press. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/007668799216036J.

Carter, M., & Shieh, J. (2015, January 1). Chapter 15 - Biochemical Assays and Intracellular Signaling (M. Carter & J. Shieh (eds.)). ScienceDirect; Academic Press. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128005118000150?via%3Dihub

Hampf, M., & Gossen, M. (2006). A protocol for combined Photinus and Renilla luciferase quantification compatible with protein assays. Analytical Biochemistry, 356(1), 94–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ab.2006.04.046.

Nakajima, Y., Kimura, T., Sugata, K., Enomoto, T., Asakawa, A., Kubota, H., Ikeda, M., & Ohmiya, Y. (2005). Multicolor luciferase assay system: one-step monitoring of multiple gene expressions with a single substrate. BioTechniques, 38(6), 891–894. https://doi.org/10.2144/05386st03.

Smale, S. T. (2010). Luciferase assay. Cold Spring Harbor Protocols, 2010(5), pdb.prot5421. https://doi.org/10.1101/pdb.prot5421.

Thorne, N., Inglese, J., & Auld, D. S. (2010). Illuminating Insights into Firefly Luciferase and Other Bioluminescent Reporters Used in Chemical Biology. Chemistry & Biology, 17(6), 646–657. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chembiol.2010.05.012.