Since the emitted light can be easily detected with a luminometer, aequorin has become a useful tool in molecular biology for the measurement of intracellular Ca levels. The early successful purification of aequorin led to the first experiments involving the injection of the protein into the tissues of living animals to visualize the physiological release of calcium in the muscle fibers of a barnacle. Since then, the protein has been widely used in many model biological systems, including zebrafish, rats, mice, and cultured cells.
Cultured cells expressing the aequorin gene can effectively synthesize apoaequorin; however, recombinant expression yields only the apoprotein. Therefore it is necessary to add coelenterazine into the culture medium of the cells to obtain a functional protein and thus use its blue light emission to measure Ca concentration.  Coelenterazine is a hydrophobic molecule, and therefore is easily taken up across plant and fungal cell walls, as well as the plasma membrane of higher eukaryotes, making aequorin suitable as a Ca reporter in plants, fungi, and mammalian cells.
Aequorin has a number of advantages over other Ca indicators. Because the protein is large, it has a low leakage rate from cells compared to lipophilic dyes such as DiI. It lacks phenomena of intracellular compartmentalization or sequestration as is often seen for Voltage-sensitive dyes, and does not disrupt cell functions or embryo development. Moreover, the light emitted by the oxidation of coelenterazine does not depend on any optical excitation, so problems with auto-fluorescence are eliminated. The primary limitation of aequorin is that the prosthetic group coelenterazine is irreversibly consumed to produce light, and requires continuous addition of coelenterazine into the media. Such issues led to developments of other genetically encoded calcium sensors including the calmodulin-based sensor cameleon, developed by Roger Tsien and the troponin-based sensor, TN-XXL, developed by Oliver Griesbeck.