The Amazing Stuff

This kind of art really grows on you. Well, actually, it grows in a petri dish — and the strange, swirling, colorful forms you’ll see here were actually carefully cultivated by microbiologists for a competition.

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) hosted its first ASM Agar Art Contest. Yep, that’s a thing!

Contestants grew various microbes in agar, a gel-like substance, and “painted” with them to form images.

This is the competition’s winner, Neurons. It’s a collaborative work by Mehmet Berkmen of New England Biolabs and artist Maria Penil.

The contestants chose their microbes, let them incubate, and guided them into various forms. Some people used multiple dishes.

This is the runner-up, called NYC Biome MAP. The work, by Christine Marizzi and her team, makes use of multiple petri dishes full of E. coli bacteria and glowing proteins to make a miniature map of Manhattan.

If you didn’t know, you would think this was created with thick oil paints — not a species of yeast.

The second runner up, Harvest, by Maria Eugenia Inda of Cold Spring Harbor Labs, looks like a Van Gogh painting.

Contestant Melanie Sullivan took the Van Gogh inspiration a step further with this petri dish recreation of Starry Night.

Mehmet Berkmen and Maria Penil, whose other entry won the contest, also submitted Cell to Cell, which used a similar color scheme.

With careful planning and guidance, some pretty amazing shapes can be made from microbes.

Lizah van der Aart used a skull-shaped container for her piece, Hunger Games.

This is Jellyfish, by Mehmet Berkmen and Maria Penil.

Some pieces took on more nebulous forms, like this one, which looks like a night sky.

This piece is Joseph Sallmen’s Streptomyces Sky.

And some are astounding in their detail. The Violet Louis Pasteur, byDharshika Jayasuriya, shows a portrait of the famous scientist.

(via Hyperallergic, Mental Floss)

If you never thought you’d find artwork in a petri dish, think again! This contest shows us that beauty can be found in the weirdest places. We hope that this becomes a yearly contest, because it’s pretty darn cool.

We all know, at least in concept, about the millions and billions of bacteria and other little beasties currently making a living on our bodies right this minute. You know they’re there, but since you can’t see them, there’s a bit of distance between you and all of your little friends.

However, that doesn’t always have to be the case. Tasha Sturm, a tech in Cabrillo College’s microbiology, physiology, and anatomy labs, created this petri dish of all the microbes hanging out on her eight-year-old son’s hand after a day at the playground.

Still, you have to admit, even as you are furiously rubbing your hands on your pants in a frantic (but futile) attempt to clean them, seeing microbes at such a scale is impressive.

So how did Sturm do it? First, she poured a solution of tryptic soy agar (TSA) and water into a sterile petri dish and let it solidify. Then, her son pressed his hand to the agar, which lifted off the small amounts of bacteria that would become the colonies you see here. The petri dish was then covered. Sturm incubated it for a day or two, which spurred growth. In room temperature, the colonies of bacteria and fungus continued to grow. Eventually, the once-invisible handprint turned into the alien-looking ecosystem you see here.

(via Colossal)

You can create something like this yourself if you’re curious about what you and your kids picked up at the park. You can order the materials and find a more detailed description of the process online. However, once the bacteria and fungus start growing enough to be visible to the naked eye, don’t open the petri dish; breathing that amount of material in can be hazardous to your health. We don’t recommend that just anyone do this without seriously looking into it beforehand.

You may now go wash your hands for 20 minutes.