Spreading backyard soil on
agar to see what would grow,
one artist wound up with the
purple and yellow shades to
make this butterfly.
Luminous in green and red,
Bacillus subtilis containing
introduced fluorescent
protein genes was used to
make this tree.The 3D volcano is a mound of agar inoculated
with the mold Cladosporium cladosporioides,
dripping with dyed-agar lava. The sand is
mold spores, and the corals are microorganisms
grown on a dyed-agar sea.E. COLI COLOR
A gene-regulating
sequence controls how
blue these E. coli bac-
teria look. “Fittingly,”
Kim says, the sequence
comes “from a marine
bacterium associated
with algae.”GROWING GREEN
Yellow S. aureus bac-
teria and blue E. coli
bacteria can be mixed
to make green. Kim
appreciates how they
“exist together to
create art, much
like marine
symbioses
themselves.”PHOTOS (TOP, THEN LEFT TO RIGHT): JANIE KIM; ARWA HADID; MICHAEL TAVEIRNE; MICHAEL V. MAGAOGAO; ALLISON WERNER; LETICIA LIMA ANGELINI; ISABEL FRANCO CASTILLO