Dinoflagellates have their own luciferin, which emits in the visible blue. A loose measurement can be done by most human eyes, in person or from video recordings. In fact, It's worthwhile to take a closer look at the chemical geometry of Dinoflagellate Luciferin, especially next to that of Chlorophyll: https://biolum.eemb.ucsb.edu/chem/detail2.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyll#/media/File:Chlorophyll_d_structur... Chlorophyll's magnesium ligand is well-known to act as a quantum antenna during photoabsorption, mostly in the blue. Dino. Luciferin has a similar structure, but without a magnesium atom at the center of approximate dihedral symmetry. Here we have an astounding example of the inversive relation between emission and absorption. The two phenomena are essentially similar under time-reversal symmetry. It could take a lot of high-power math to try and prove such a statement, see for example: http://bohr.physics.berkeley.edu/classes/221/1112/221.html ( Notes, 20, 32 & 41 ) One objection is that entropy favours emission over absorption, but this is not too difficult to get around. Absorption/emission is usually said to occur in the ultrafast regime, i.e. on the order of a femtosecond. Meanwhile, radiative lifetimes indicate a bound for the time scale where entropy is a more relevant concept. A lifetime figure written in nanoseconds, would be roughly six orders of magnitude slower than the instantaneous time of an emission or absorption event. ++Brad On Sat, Jun 29, 2019 at 3:03 AM Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> wrote:
Are there multiple color variants of luciferin? —rwg