My Wikijourney

Impressed with other folks usage of wikipedia in their blogs - I decided to do my own.

Lets start with a link-trail of my journey :

Firefly -> bioluminescence -> luciferase -> luciferin -> oxidation -> pigment


A couple weekends ago I went down a river to see some fireflies on the river bed... its in the wikipedia article on fireflies actually (the fireflies.. even mentions malaysia) the neat thing about the fireflies here is they blink synchronously ... this is because the male's light is the navigational methods for a female to find her mate. Its kind of like the men gather together and shout as loud as they can all at once 'lets procreate'... Only if people could be like fireflies - > lots of more loving in the world thats for sure.

I wanted to know more about the how. Flying insects is already a remarkable thing. How they store so much energy in such a tiny place to perform milli/micro-aerodynamic maneuvers/mechanical feats that math folks/scientists have wet dreams over is already incredible enough. But they fly and emit light that in a scalable sense would be like a car emitting the light from 1000 football fields (okay thats a big estimation... but I'm sure the idea is right) so how do they do that?

Fireflies have ATP -> the holy grail energy currency for most of 'life'. My own comments of ATP. Why is it remarkable?
Look at where ATP comes from, what ATP works with, and what ATP does.

For example, it does much much much more than just store/transport energy. It also aids in intra/extracellular communication. (wikipedia)

In one word - ATP is versatile.

So back to my question about fireflies. And on to another two fascinating biomolecules. Lucerin and Luciferase. Don't let the funny names fool you. Luciferase is more like the garden of eden. It provides fertile land for luciferin to come, find an ATP molecule, take its energy and produce a beautiful bioflashlight. It needs one more thing in the chemical equation ... oxygen. You can look at oxygen as the handler of electrons (i think) hydrogen is another good handler of electrons... the best is when hydrogen and oxygen get together.. then we have a real party!


So I'm still a bit confused about the process. I've learned a lot of neat stuff but still not answered my question really.
I know that light is produced when an electron in a high energy state travels to a lower energy state. I know there are chemical reactions going on here.
To be honest I still have no f*cking clue. Shti what a waste of time.


Oh well, Imagine a thousand people in times square on new years holding up their hands as flashlights... far fetched? Probably. In the wacky world of science they have actually figured out how to reproduce these molecules in other stuff (not fireflies). I could go on about how this has been useful.. but I won't.

someone made tobacco glow... quite some time ago http://www.bio.net/hypermail/cell-biology/1999-November/011743.html
I suppose the next step is the ganja plant - that would be a real money maker!