Microbiologists draw with bacteria

Art in a Petri Dish
(Questions about the quality of the translation and the original source should be addressed to comrades from the InFuture website.
And reproductions of paintings from microbes completely compensate for the clumsiness of the text – VM.)

This flower-like image is the work of Eshel Ben-Yaakov, a professor of physics at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Ben-Jacob's work is colored artificially, but the model itself is produced by bacteria. For example, by limiting the colony's food source, it can be reorganized into long tendrils, increasing its surface area to find more nutrients.

In this image, also by Ben-Jacob, you can see the narrow tentacles with which the bacteria are trying to find nutrients. In order to thrive in difficult living conditions, colonies must adapt. The organization of the entire colony requires the interaction and cooperation of individual microorganisms. Ben-Yakov's creativity is a testament to this organization. If scientists can understand how bacteria work together, they can find new ways to outsmart them: for example, by disrupting their communication systems.

This is another of the creations of Eshel Ben-Jacob: he calls him a Dragon. By continuing to hold the food to get an interesting shape, he also exposed the bacteria to harmful chemicals.

London-based artist Erna-Eric Reiten grows his works from bacteria on his body. He takes a swab, and then processes the collected bacteria onto a film with a gelatin surface. Bacteria eat gelatin, producing chemicals that react with the film. The negatives are then processed in a dark room, creating effects that can be observed here.

Hunter Cole of Loyola University Chicago produces "living drawings" made from several Petri dishes of bioluminescent bacteria. She photographed them for two weeks, capturing the various stages of their life cycle. The forms flow into each other, while the bacteria begin to glow less brightly and die.

This image of Proteus Mirabilis colonies from researcher James Shapiro. Shapiro works in the field of bacterial genetics at the University of Chicago, and is interested in structure formation during colony growth and "natural genetic engineering". It is believed that this will happen when some organisms begin to actively restructure their genomes due to harsh climatic conditions.

This image, Mario, was presented in 2009 by a team of nanobiologists from Osaka, Japan. They used genetic engineering to express fluorescent proteins and carotenoid pigments to create a work of art. At the beginning of the summer, sets of standard parts, called biocubics, began to be produced in IGEM. They use these and their building blocks to invent new biological machines.

Alexander Fleming is best known for his discovery of penicillin in 1928 and for the subsequent Nobel Prize. He was also one of the first people to discover the creative potential of microbes. This is an example of one of his "germ paintings" created with the help of living bacteria.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru18.12.2009