still swarming

 There's a little feature on Simon Park & me & Serratia marcescens doing painting on page 132 in  this month's Microbiology Today, the splendid organ of the Society for General Microbiology. You might like to see it because Simon is doing the talking here and it's very nice.

making paintings with bacteria

In Simon's lab at the University of Surrey

Before and after pictures of these two plates of collaborative paintings between myself, Serratia marcescens and Simon Park.

 

So the paint medium is this wonderfully contaminated but nevertheless fragrant and delicious mixture of gum arabic, honey and glycerin in water.  The pigments I'm using are:

A: ultramarine  (Na_8-10Al₆Si₆O₂₄S_2-4 , a.k.a. Reckitt's or dolly blue)

B: phthalo blue  (C₃₂H₁₆N₈Cu , humanity's contribution to the porphyrins)

C: diarylide yellow (you can buy 100 tons per month from this company)

D: phthalo green (like the blue, only the phthalocyanine is chlorinated)

E: cobalt violet (Co₃(PO₄)₂ )

F: zinc white ( Philosophers' Wool to you)

G: chrome green (Cr₂O₃)

H: lamp black (we scrape it off the gas lamps on our way to t'mill in the mornings and keep it in our flat caps.)

Because of the interactions with those opportunistic chaps in the paint this is a total flop as regards answering any of my paint-bacteria questions, and so much the better, sez I, as it means I can use some of my favourite phrases about it such as "inconclusive" and "poorly understood" and will therefore just have to do some more of this very fun and nice work.

More painting bacteria!

Well I was going to wait and put these up on my website whenever I get round to making it but as I seem to have your attention right now thought you might like to see some more of the nice pictures made by Serratia marcescens, Simon Park and me. These are close-ups from two plates, in no particular order.

There are also some Micrococcus luteus and Micrococcus roseas in there, rather drowned out by ythe Serratia.  And some other bacteria who hitched a ride in the paint, I don't know what the tiny pale colonies are but they probably came off me and found my gum arabic/honey/glycerin medium a delightful place to live.

 

Photos by Simon Park.

we know who you are because we can see where you've been

More of the little animalcules, and billions of 'em, moving furiously with their little paws like pissabeds being thrown against a wall, as dear old Granddaddy Leeuwenhoek might have said.

Look what they did to the Chrome Green! I think some of the paint here has been floating on top of their swarming and they seem to have carried it with them.

These are Simon Park's wonderful photographs.