Meet LumiFAST: NanoLuc®’s brightness, color-tuned by FAST fluorogens. This new tool emits light without any excitation source, and its emission colour is chosen simply by swapping the fluorogen you add.
The work comes from the group of Prof. Arnaud Gautier (Sorbonne Université, ENS-PSL), published in ACS Sensors 2026 by Horgan Manirakiza, Yuriy Shpinov, Amandine Gontier and colleagues.
The fluorogen tunes LumiFAST’s colour, from blue (LumiFASTdark) to red (LumiFAST600). Adapted from Manirakiza et al. (2026).
Bioluminescent luciferases have become powerful bioimaging tools: because they need no excitation light, they eliminate phototoxicity and background autofluorescence. What they lacked was an easy way to tune colour. LumiFAST solves this by fusing the bright blue-emitting NanoLuc luciferase to pFAST, the tunable chemogenetic FAST reporter. pFAST binds and switches on a range of synthetic fluorogens. Sitting right next to NanoLuc, it converts the luciferase’s blue emission wavelength into a longer, tunable wavelength through bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET).
What LumiFAST delivers
- One construct, many colours. Because pFAST accepts different fluorogens, LumiFAST’s emission tunes from cyan through green, yellow and orange to red. There is no need to re-engineer the protein: you just change the small molecule you add.
- Compact and modular. pFAST is small, so LumiFAST stays a tidy fusion that is easy to target and multiplex.
- High-efficiency BRET. Systematic optimization of fusion topology and linker length pushed apparent BRET efficiencies up to 90%.
- Deeper and dual-colour. The red-shifted output supports dual-colour microscopy alongside plain NanoLuc, and imaging through thick, scattering tissue.
- Beyond imaging. The same NanoLuc-pFAST design was turned into biosensors reporting protease activity and protein-protein interactions in live cells.
Here is the twist for our customers: LumiFAST’s colour is set by the very fluorogens we distribute. The reporter is pFAST, and its emission window is chosen with the HBR fluorogens (TFLime, TFAmber and TFCoral) that The Twinkle Factory sells off the shelf. Add a different tube, get a different colour of light. The pFAST plasmid is available through Addgene; NanoLuc is a Promega reagent.
More reading on LumiFAST and pFAST
- Chemogenetic Modulation of Luciferase Emission Color for Imaging and Sensing. Manirakiza, H., Shpinov, Y., Gontier, A., El Hajji, L., Jullien, L., Gautier, A. ACS Sensors 2026, 11(4), 3156-3165. doi.org/10.1021/acssensors.5c04421
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