Art Projects Category

All that glitters may not be gold–it could be microbes!

I recently started teaching myself hand embroidery, and I thought it would be fun to use it as the medium for my final project. I was very indecisive throughout the process so I ended up making a few random things (some that are shown below). The final piece of work I created was inspired by the bacterial isolate project, specifically my own isolate. The first plate I swabbed with my environmental sample had a mixture of yellow, white, and orange bacteria. I ended up isolating a bacterium that grows in pale yellow colonies, Pseudomonas denitrificans. I didn’t have pale yellow thread, but I did have gold so I figured that was close enough. The first zig-zag streaked plate is based off my original sample culture, the second is based off my first quadrant streak, and the third is based off my final (4th) quadrant streak.

 

*Although my isolate technically didn’t have anything to do with gold, there is however, a type of bacteria that can detoxify gold into pure gold nanoparticles (Delftia acidovarans and Cupriavidis metallidurans, and possibly others). The process of detoxifying dissolved gold ions is a defense mechanism for these bacteria.

Other items I attempted to recreate include a T-4 bacteriophage, rRNA tree of life, E. coli bacterium, plasmids and horizontal gene transfer, a few are pictured below.

I realized in class today that I had of course forgotten to actually finish uploading my stuff to website….

 

For this art project, I really needed to do some searching. I am not an artist person by any means. It’s difficult for me to even draw a stick figure. Growing up in Alaska, I’ve always admired its beauty, so I wanted to do something that could possibly depict the spring time here in Fairbanks. However, it’s not necessarily pretty. It’s muddy, it’s messy, it’s dirt covered snow and soggy grass. I’ve seen wax art like this before, but instead of showing something streaking down and falling on to something, I decided to show the growth of something through what resembles the decomposition of the flowers before these to fertilize this growth. The flowers that we do have here are dime a dozen and they are beautiful if they can grow strong and tall enough to push through the fertilized soil. Also, I’ve always thought that the first day of spring is the first day you see a butterfly, so I decided to add one of those little guys!

Microbiology Art Project  For my art project, I chose to do an offshoot of a renga.  For those of you who don’t know what a renga is: it is a japanese form of poetry meant for a party occasion.  One performer writes a stanza that is 5, 7, then 5  syllables (you may know that as a haiku) then it is passed to someone who writes a 7, 7 syllable stanza.  This repeats on and on till the renga is complete.  Usually rengas are 100 stanzas, but I stopped at 50.  That’s a lot of stanzas 😀  I wanted to do stanzas that kind of encompass things we learned and experienced in class.  I’m not the best poet, so it’s not the most exciting form of art ever, but I did put time and care into it to make sure I followed the organizational structure, at least.

So, I wrote this poem with the intention of creating a way to study. It’s a lot easier to remember terms when they rhyme so I figured it could be fun to give it a shot. I’ve never really done anything with poetry since a class in 8^th grade, but couplets have always been my favorite. I really like how they make short little rhymes and they glue themselves in your head. I never would have thought that half of these words would ever fit into a poem, but if “spontaneous generation’ can flow smoothly, there’s not many words that couldn’t.

Ideally, I’d make the poem much longer and cover all the topics that we have gone over in class. I wanted something that flowed through the path of things we had learned over the semester, but I had to leave out several major topics due to the time constraint. Before presenting my poem in class, I’d like to add on to it to better cover the topics that I missed.

The poem can be read really anyway you’d like to read it. I more-or-less put the stanzas in the order that we learned about them, but I feel like each individual one could still stand out on its own. As I said before, I didn’t cover everything, I hope each little rhyme is able to stick in your head and maybe help you out on the final.

 

A Microbial Review

 

Wee animalcules, that’s the name

Controlling the world, that’s their game

Coccus, Bacillus, and in-between too

There’s not one thing microbes can’t do.

 

Described by Hooke in 1665,

On almost any surface they do thrive.

Leeuwenhoek saw them at 200 X

But where did they come from, these little specs?

 

Spontaneous generation, that’s our theory

They come from thin air? That’s just eerie.

Next came Pasteur, with his swan-necked flask

He’d prove them all wrong, he was up to the task.

 

Discoveries were made, but the results were ignored

Semmelweis shouldn’t have been fired, he deserved a reward.

The people realized that cleanliness was needed

Thanks to Nightingale and Lister the people conceded.

 

What we’ve learned so far is just the beginning

It’s like a game of baseball, but only second inning.

With advances like staining, we divide them in two

Positive or negative but purple, pink, and red in our view

 

The can grow and be counted using several different tools

Defined and complex media each have their own set of rules

We have plate counts, slide counts, and turbidity too

Indirect requires a direct method, but I’m sure that you knew.

 

Microbes can move wherever they please

Some use flagella, swimming with ease

Or maybe act like Spiderman just give it a go

You need twitching motility to be this hero

 

Microbes consume everything from rocks to light

Responsible for nutrient cycling with all their might

Metabolic pathways can go down any different path

Try using an electron tower, but double check your math

 

Forget antibiotics if you catch some of these

Viruses have their own rules and it’s your cells they seize

Whether it’s lysogenic or lytic the cycle ends the same

Your cell gets destroyed with nothing to reclaims

 

Antibiotic resistance is a big problem we face

Each problem solved creates an evolutionary arms race

Will the war ever end? I’m not so sure

But stay clean, be healthy and you’ll endure

For my microbial art project, I wanted something that was just as aesthetically pleasing as it was related to a microbial concept. I was fascinated by the appearance of diatoms, and how perfectly symmetrical they seemed to be. Many diatoms I saw when looking up reference images almost resembled gears; a fitting concept, as even though gears are a small part of a bigger machine, they are important to the structure and function of the machine as a whole. Microbes are almost like gears in a machine this way. Though small, they have made a big impact in the development of life as we know it.