Preserving Agar Art

[Christopher Monaco]

Hi all,

Has anyone out there doing Agar Art found a reliable way to "preserve" the art once it's finished. We've tried simply pouring a two-part epoxy over the plates, but that doesn't stop bacterial growth. We've also tried brief UV exposure prior to pouring the epoxy but no luck either. I've read it's possible to use formalin to fix the art but I'm not sure about how to do that. Any recommendations?  

[John Griessen]

On 11/21/18 8:36 AM, Christopher Monaco wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Has anyone out there doing Agar Art found a reliable way to "preserve" the art once it's finished.

I've not done agar art, but have made silk screen and intaglio prints. Learn printmaking technique and experiment with transfer
to art paper of permanent pigments or dyes that are somehow bonded to the grown cultures by color. Art that is known to be
permanent sells a lot more than anything on cheap substrate that can never time travel. Instead of transferring live cells, just
make a photo of your culture, image process a retouch it, and use that for photolith color layer stack up to print on fine art
paper and sell as durable art image prints in limited editions just like Warhol did so well.

Any preserved version of life will be "dull and lifeless" looking even if it contains read DNA and cell breakdown products.
Wonderfully colorful fish turn pale colored or grey when dead, same with microbes.

Creating photos with exact same size with different light filters and maybe different sprayed on solutions to change how
a culture stains could give nice contrasty grown art. Some might work to change the staining effect when applied to the same
substrate and photographed with different filters to get nice effects of color and contrasts on different zones. Then again use
GIMP to image process, swap colors, etc. to develop grown art for sale.

[Skyler Gordon]

Well, you could always take a nice picture of it but I would see how that has less appeal than preserving a Petri dish. If your epoxy is just on the top of the dish I could understand how that would allow the microbes to keep growing uninhibited, but as John said killing the microbes may lead to a lack of color.

You could attempt to stain some sort of cell wall or filament (actin, peptiodglycan, something there is a lot of) after some sort of heat / cold shocking to preserve both the colors and shape of your art after killing the microbes.

If you can preserve the colors after microbial death, then pouring on a two part epoxy (boat epoxies are good to buy in bulk, come in primarily clear, and can be polished easily - there is also a great company called ‘ecopoxy’) would still be a good idea to keep anything else from growing on the agar in the future.

If you’ve modified the cells the be specific colors, you could also attempt to program in some sort of cell-death mechanism. Either cell-cycle timed death or inducible death.

-SG

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[Dakota Hamill]

Ive seen dessication work if we leave a plate for to long or forget It. It can lead to really cool fractal patterns. Bacillus mycoides is quite cool when totally dry. 

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[EarlA]

You might find something at Amino Labs here https://amino.bio/collections They have several options. I have not used their products - just browsing their site...