The First photo is from the regular agar. The colors available made me instantly think of Homer Simpson. The next was EMB where I was hoping to get more fermentation by the time I took that photo to get a glow around a moon in the night sky. The final was also not fermenting well but was supposed to be a viking ship on the sea with a red sky behind it. Overall a very fun lab session!
The top picture of a horse is actually a picture of my dog. The EMB agar turned black under the fermenting bacteria to match lola’s fur. The Macconkey plate was intended to be a smiley face. The bacteria was too effective and lowered the Ph and turned the agar white. The final picture was supposed to be a sunset but the bacteria didn’t grow red as I expected
For the project “Painting with Microbes’, I chose to tell about cold winters in Fairbanks. The time when people see a lot of Northern Lights, try to stay warm, and dream about spring to arrive faster. That’s why the following “paintings’ were named “The warming fire’, “Aurora Borealis’, and “The Chamomile’, respectively.
The TSA plate with “The Chamomile’ on it was inoculated with K. rhizophila, B. cereus, and P. aeroginoza to produce yellow, off-white, and clear-green colors, respectively. The TSA medium is just complex, not selective. So, the “colors” from bacteria turned out just right.
The EMB medium is both selective and differential. The EMB is selective medium for Gram-negative bacteria and the plate was inoculated with S. marcescens for “The Warming Fire’ project. This microorganism is Gram-negative and produce less acid which turn the media color pink to “reddish”.
On the selective and differential MAC media, the “yellow’ stars are “made of’ K.rhizophila, a Gram-negative microorganism.
In my painting I drew a simplified version of the very thing that we are painting with: a bacterium. I painted a cell wall and tried to put a smaller one inside of it to make it look like it is Gram positive, but it did not show up very well. I also added a little bit of super coiled DNA, a vacuole, and 2 cilia to complete the bacterium.
My first one was inspired by my fat mice back at home. My second one was just a paw print, nothing really too creative. The third one was supposed to be a tic tac toe game, but for some reason the O’s didn’t end up growing, despite me giving them extra time.
The top picture of the mushroom was my best one. It microbes grew in full and filled out the picture. However, in the second picture the microbes did not grow as much, but I think if given more time they would have been solid in the area where they were growing.
Here’s my art plate on TSA. I attempted to recreate a pokemon from the newest series of games, a small orb shaped owl named Rowlet. The main colors i needed were white, brown and a yellow/orange, green and black. Most of these were readily available except black, so red was substituted instead. It could have been neater but I’m pretty satisfied with how it turned out. My main issue with my final product was that i marked the plates in the center because i didn’t think it would show through the plate.
My microbial paintings don’t have much of a theme to them, I just made the first three things that popped into my head as I sat in the lab, casting about for ideas.
First, on TSA, we have some ungodly reaction going on in an uncorked test tube. I am reminded of a colorimetric analysis of phytochemicals I did last summer where the solvent reacted with the test reagents and made a Serratia-like color rather than the ivory I was expecting.
Second is my somewhat feeble attempt to create the effect of nebulosity with MacConkey agar. I was trying to make a barred spiral galaxy. I got a mess. It did create the effect of nebulosity, though.
Lastly, a rendition of my favorite Esports team’s logo. Google Echo Fox if you want to see what it’s supposed to look like. I don’t want to talk about it.
The spelling of Echo as “Ekko” is something of a joke if you know anything about League of Legends.
I chose relatively basic microbe combinations for my paintings, but wanted to see what the different mediums would do to the microbial growths. I was extremely upset by the lack of E. coli for the presence of the deep metallic green I had seen in images of this project.
I cannot upload the images of my microbial plates, but I created a fish, a flower, and a stylized ‘S’.
My intent was to create three different pieces using the same microbes, and see how differently they could all look. I didn’t look up how the microbes would interact with each other, or how they would grow on the different agars, because I thought it would be a more interesting artistic process to set the microbes down on medium and see how they went from there. Something of a Deistic process, where once things have been set in motion, they are not interfered with, regardless of if the result is what I had initially pictured or not.
Through all the [gram]negative blows UAF has been taking recently, remember that there is always room for beauty and creativity.
I wanted this plate to illustrate the awesome concepts we get to explore here at UAF through our science programs. We obviously need greater awareness.
I really just wanted to make a cool, sun/mandala-type design with the TSA plate… My goal was to incorporate many colors… especially bright colors