Just a bit of fun for a Friday… I’ve often thought that some of what we molecular biologists do with staining and things could easily pass for artwork, but I’ve never seen anything like this fantastic agar plate artwork posted on Wikipedia. It shows a San Diego beach scene drawn on an agar plate using an eight color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins.
The colors are derived from GFP and the red-fluorescent coral protein dsRed and include BFP, mTFP1, Emerald, Citrine, mOrange, mApple, mCherry and mGrape.
Very clever!!…
Artwork by Nathan Shaner, photography by Paul Steinbach, created in the lab of Roger Tsien in 2006.
About the Author
Nick Oswald
Nick is a molecular biologist who grazes in the field of biocatalysis by day and cooks up Bitesize Bio by night.
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