The U. de Chile team is honored at the international Agar Art event
Works from all over the world participate in this international event that honors the best artistic designs with microbes, a competition organized since 2015 by Agar Art of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), which seeks to engage the public interested in this interrelationship between art and science.
A team led by a professor Andrés MarcoletaAcademician of the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Chile, together with André Barbeta fine arts graduate and a sociology student at Casa de Bello, he received his degree third place at the professional level in the renowned Agar Art competition of the American Society for Microbiology. This is the second award in a row received for this initiative, as in 2022 they won first place in the category “America”.
Since 2015, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Agar Art Competition has combined science with art to engage a non-scientific audience interested in this intersection of art and science, specifically microbiology.
This year the work is titled “Microbiology in Space”led by artist André Barbet and undergraduate and postgraduate students from the University’s Faculty of Science. The team was composed of Amelia Cox-Fermandois, A. Victoria Suárez-Clerc, Hazajem Colque-Ferrer and Camilo Berríos-Pastén.
According to the job description, “Mars 2020 is an ongoing NASA mission that is exploring the Red Planet for signs of past microbial life and also conducting tests in preparation for future manned missions. To that end, the Perseverance rover was sent along with the Ingenuity drone to perform tasks such as collecting soil samples and testing oxygen production in the Martian atmosphere. Our work shows persistence, ingenuity and the name of the mission using 2 different bacteria isolated from the Atacama Desert (Chile), the most similar place to Mars on Earth.. The plates were made by exposing a freshly inoculated bacterial lawn to germicidal UV radiation through the templates to limit microbial proliferation to only the covered areas. However, Even when exposed to about 10 times the time needed to kill Escherichia coli, some colonies still grew in uncovered areas, demonstrating how UV-resistant desert bacteria can be.. The image on each plate was cropped from an individual photograph to create this 3 image montage. Templates are based on NASA/JPL-Caltech images.”
Professor Marcoleta invites those interested in learning more about art with microorganisms and bioart in general to read the publication created by this team on this topic. “We invite you to read our book where we developed a technique for making an image with bacteria and copper as an antimicrobial agent. There will also be a brief overview of bioart at a global level and a discussion of copper as a natural resource and innovative ways to use it, beyond extraction.”
You can learn more about the work of this team in the book “Of Copper, Microbes and Art” (2021)
Journalist Ruth Tapia
Communication Department of the Faculty of Science
University of Chile
