Biophoton emission induced by heat shock.

Katsuhiro Kobayashi,Yoshiki Hidaka,Hirotaka Okabe,Kazuhiro Hara,Shinya Kawano,Sabato D'Auria

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0105700

Abstract

Ultraweak biophoton emission originates from the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that are produced in mitochondria as by-products of cellular respiration. In healthy cells, the concentration of ROS is minimized by a system of biological antioxidants. However, heat shock changes the equilibrium between oxidative stress and antioxidant activity, that is, a rapid rise in temperature induces biophoton emission from ROS. Although the rate and intensity of biophoton emission was observed to increase in response to elevated temperatures, pretreatment at lower high temperatures inhibited photon emission at higher temperatures. Biophoton measurements are useful for observing and evaluating heat shock.

Highlights

All living organisms emit very weak light, which differs from the bioluminescence produced by luciferin-luciferase systems in fireflies, photobacteria, and hydromedusae
The energy for this luminescence is produced when an excited biological molecule drops to a lower energy state [4,5], and the majority of the excited biological molecules are reactive oxygen species (ROS) [11,12,13,14,15]
The production of ROS is important because even low concentrations of ROS are toxic to living cells, as they impair membrane functioning by peroxidation of membrane lipids, reduce enzyme activity through the oxidization of peptides and carbohydrates, and promote the oxidation ornamentation of nucleic acids in DNA

Summary

Introduction

All living organisms emit very weak light, which differs from the bioluminescence produced by luciferin-luciferase systems in fireflies, photobacteria, and hydromedusae This light is observed as a series of individual photon emissions and the resulting luminescence, as well as the phenomenon itself, is referred to as biophoton emission [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. The production of ROS is important because even low concentrations of ROS are toxic to living cells, as they impair membrane functioning by peroxidation of membrane lipids, reduce enzyme activity through the oxidization of peptides and carbohydrates, and promote the oxidation ornamentation of nucleic acids in DNA

Methods

Results

Conclusion