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From 2012.igem.org

Night of Arts and Science

Designer Leen van Wijngaarden was fascinated by the colors and shapes of bacterial colonies and decided to make art with them. Not just a pretty picture on a small regular agar plate, like this well-known example, but on a large scale. This should produce nice paintings, which keep evolving into "Bacterial Beauties". iGEM Groningen 2012 assisted with preparing the XL agar plates and painting them with bacteria. Resulting in this beautiful picture on the Night of Arts and Science (2 June 2012):

Because of the microbiological background of many team members, we could help Leen not only during the making of the pictures, but we could also take the oppurtunity to teach the visitors of the Night about the beauty of bacteria, their use, synthetic biology and our project.

Apart from exposing the bio-paintings and the huge "bio-billboard", time lapse movies of bacteria growing on a normal plate and microscopic images of bacteria were shown. Furthermore, in aid of explaining about synthetic biology, our team showed some paintings with an overview of our project.

As an extra feature, a "bacterial wall of fame" was built, with handprints of "famous people from Groningen" was made. People, including some iGEM members, had pressed their hands on agar plates, which where afterwards incubated over night. At the night, this showed a nice diversity of skin inhabitants...