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Disclosures No conflicts of interest declared. Acknowledgments This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas ""Mesoscopic Neurocircuitry"" (No. 22115002) and ""Comprehensive Brain Science Network"" (No. 221S0003) of The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Japan to A.N. and Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) (No. 21700344) of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to H.K.""A variety of luciferase-based reporters for monitoring a diverse array of cell biological processes are commercially available. The majority of these DNA constructs encode luciferase proteins that are induced to express by specific cell stimuli or perturbations. The most robust transcriptionally based reporters place the expression of a luciferase enzyme under the control of synthetic enhancer elements or gene promoter regions well-established for their reliability in reporting a physiologically relevant transcriptional event1,2. There are also trans-reporter luciferase Reelin systems that utilize GAL4-UAS to drive luciferase protein expression. Gal4 is a yeast transcriptional activator and the UAS is an enhancer to which Gal4 specifically binds to activate the transcription of gene sequences placed down-stream of it3. These types of luciferase systems are typically supported by two DNA plasmids - one encodes the GAL4 protein fused to the regulatory portion of a protein of interest, and the second encodes a luciferase protein placed under the control of one or more UAS sequences. Thus, the cellular luciferase signal reflects the activity level of the protein of interest. Another common use of luciferase-based reporters is for monitoring protein stability whereby a protein of interest is fused to a luciferase enzyme4. Regardless of the type of reporter, a caveat emptor is noted here as one cannot assume the specificity of any reporter to have been well interrogated. Thus, due diligence is required in the incorporation of new reporter constructs in any research strategy. The selection of the luciferase enzyme read-out can be as important as the reliability of the DNA elements that control its expression. Whereas firefly luciferase (FL) is the most commonly used enzyme in commercially available constructs, the advent of new luciferase reporter systems that do not require ATP (as in the case of FL-based reactions) or that incorporate more stable enzymes that emit stronger signals promise to improve the efficiency and reliability of this research platform. An important note regarding the selection of luciferase reporters in chemical studies is the susceptibility of FL to chemical inhibition that could give rise to false reports.