Abstract
We describe a protocol for imaging bacterial luciferase (Lux)-expressing bacteria in small living animals. In this protocol, light emitted by Lux-expressing bacteria is detected and monitored by a cooled charge-coupled device detector. When these bacteria are administered to animals, it provides a potentially valuable approach to generate sensitive whole-body images with extremely low background. This imaging technology should enable the real-time monitoring of bacterial migration into both primary and metastatic tumors in several different mouse tumor models at a strong quantification power.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Young-Soon Seo for the technical assistance. This work was supported by a grant from the National R&D Program for Cancer Control (0620330-1), Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea, and partially by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) grant funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Republic of Korea, through its National Nuclear Technology Program (M20702010003-07N0201-00300). H.E.C. was supported by the KOSEF grant funded by the Korea government (MOST) (no. 2007-04213) and Y.H. was supported by Grant No. RTI05-01-01 from the Regional Technology Innovation Program of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy.
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Min, JJ., Nguyen, V., Kim, HJ. et al. Quantitative bioluminescence imaging of tumor-targeting bacteria in living animals. Nat Protoc 3, 629–636 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2008.32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2008.32
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