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Antibiotics

Materials

Sterile Water

LB Agar Powder

2. Grow Paint Palette

1. Make LB Agar Plates

5. Incubate

Nitrile Gloves

Canvas Kit

4. Paint living Canvas

Start Making LB Agar Plates

3. Incubate

Microwave

Petri dishes

LB agar is both the food that bacteria eat and a structure they grow on. LB agar is similar to Jell-O. If it helps, pretend you are making bacteria Jell-O! Drag the sterile water into the microwave so you can boil it.

Your water is boiling!

Next Step

LB agar powder dissolves at ~80 °C, so your water needs to boil. Turn on the Microwave.

Put on your purple Nitrile Gloves. You should always wear gloves to protect your experiments from you and you from your experiments

LB agar powder looks like Jell-O powder, but is more nutritious. It contains sugars, amino acids, and minerals that bacteria need to grow. Pour the LB agar powder into the boiling water.

The agar powder will have cooled down your water when you added it. To make sure the water is still boiling hot, place the bottle in the microwave once more for 4 seconds. This makes sure that the agar powder will be able to dissolve. An important step!

You now have Molten LB Agar. You are now going to add antibiotics to your LB agar so that only the colorful engineered bacteria from the Canvas Kit will grow.

Add the Antibiotics!

First, you must always label your plates! Grab the marker to label your plates with your initials so that it is clear the plates belong to you. Labeling plates is an important part of biosafety.

Ok! Let’s pour plates!

You must always label your plates on the bottom. That way if the lid falls off, the part that contains the LB agar will always be labelled. You’re now ready to make your LB agar petri dishes.

Add the pill to your molten agar to make sure only your bacteria grow. This is called selection (making selective plates). Drag the pill into the molten LB agar and gently swirl until the pill dissolves.

You are done with the first step! You’ve made LB agar plates that you will use for your living art. Now, you are going to grow your painting palette

Next Step: Painting Palette

LB agar petri dish

DNA Playground

2. Grow Paint Palette

Yellow loops

1. Make LB Agar Plates

“Bacteria paint"

Make your palette

Start by turning on your Incubator to 37 ℃ so that it is warm when you need it later on.

You need to get some cells from the bacteria paint tube onto your loop so that you transfer them to the LB agar. This is called “amplifying” the cells. Dip your sterile yellow loop into one of the tube of “bacteria paint” E. coli cells.

Dip!

Next Step

Whoa down there, you only need to dip once! Really, you only need to touch the surface of the LB agar in the tube because there are lots of cells there.

The goal of the following step is streak or “rub” some of your cells from the tubes onto the surface of your LB agar Petri dish so that after you incubate them, there will be a lot more cells to make bioart with. 1) Since you have 3 colours of cells (batceria paint) in a typical Canvas Kit, you will do 3 zig zags of cells in the sections you marked on your petri dish 2) taking a new sterile yellow loop each time, you’ll dip it into a tube of colourful cells and then rub a zig zag onto your petri dish 3) after each colored cells is streaked, dispose of the loop into your your disposal container or inactivation bag.

42 C

Off

30 C

Try Streaking

Cold Station

Heat Station

37 C

Incubate

Congrats! You successfully streaked K12 E. coli cells onto your non-selective LB agar plates! Its time to incubate them.

Wait!!!! One more thing…. You have to flip your plate so the lid is down. This makes sure that moisture floats up and keeps the surface of the LB agar moist. Cells like to be moist!

Flip the plate

Ok, now incubate

Paint your living art

3. Incubate

Success! You’ve grown your painting pallette. You will now use this bacteria paint to create your living bioart. In the next step you will use sterile brushes to collect small amounts of these cells and streak them in the shape of your choice onto your other LB agar Petri dishes.

3. Incubate

Try the Canvas kit hands-on!

If it was helpful you can also go further with the Zero to Genetic Engineering Hero book!

Learn how to responsibly dispose of experiment materials:

What is DNA? simulator

2. Grow Paint Pallette

Learn more about DNA:

Inactivation procedure

Use your knowledge of cells to try genetic engineering:

5. Incubate

Try this experiment in real life:

Genetic Engineering simulator

Now that you know about bioart, you can:

Inactivation procedure

What is DNA? simulator

Genetic Engineering simulator

Try the Canvas Kit hands-on!

Art by Flowery Branch High School

When you think of science, you usually think about hypotheses, experimental design, analyzing results. On the other hand when you think of art, you probably think of paint, sculpture, self-expression. BioArt is a new discipline that mixes both science and art. Instead of traditional art materials, you use living organisms as your medium to create artworks. In the process, you also learn important aspects of science like growing organisms and manipulating them using different environmental factors.

Try a new kind of art: Bio Art!

Painting with bacteria that express (produce) different color pigments so they look colorful is a great first step into the exciting new world of BioArt. But don’t be fooled! while it may seem simple, painting with bacteria is a challenging and hi-tech activity!

Learn to create your own!

Put the lid on

Then, you place the lid back on 3/4 of the way and let the agar cool. The molten agar will solidify. These plates will be used to grow your bacteria.

After the antibiotic pill dissolves, pour the molten LB agar into all the plates so that each plate is half full. Tip the bottle to pour your agar.

Start the Canvas Kit Simulation!

Do it in real life

The greatest scientists are artists as well

-Albert Einstein

Objective: Learn about cells (bacteria), how to grow them, and how you can use them as paint to create living art Tips: 1. Click on objects throughout, there may be hidden information 2. Tweet any technical questions at @aminobiolab

Learn how to grow cells and make agar art!

Welcome to Virtual Bioengineer: Canvas Kit Edition

Start

Hot Station

OK, got it!

This is your control panel for controlling your DNA Playground! Press the buttons to control the machine!

The hot station allows you to incubate tubes at warm temperatures. In labs, you would often use a hot water bath, and a thermometer.

The cold station keeps tubes cold. In labs, you would often use ice in an ice bucket.

The Incubator is a “little oven” in the side of your DNA Playground that can store two petri dishes (DNA Playground Home) or eight petri dishes (DNA Playground Large). The incubator can hold the right temperature for incubating E. coli cells and Yeast cells.

Incubator

Screen

See the DNA Playground

The hot station allows you to incubate tubes and petri dishes at warm temperatures. In labs, you would often use an incubator, a water bath, and a thermometer.

Here is a quick introduction to the tools you'll use in this simulator - a “Canvas Kit” which has all the ingredients you need to make living art (bacteria, food, paintbrushes, etc.) - a DNA Playground, the lab equipment for growing your bacteria and living art.

What is the Canvas kit? Why are we using it?

- Sterile water (50 mL) - Petri dishes (4x) - Blank & image stencil - Bacteria Paint

OK, Let’s Start

The Canvas Kit comes with all of the ingredients you need to do your first BioArt activity: paint a living picture using colorful bacteria, and safely inactivate (dispose of) your BioArt waste. Since bacteria need to be handled and grown in a specific way, and you need to use specific type of bacteria to stay safe in your activity, the Canvas Kit makes it easy for you to get started and learn how this all works. The kit contains the following items and you will learn about each during this simulation:

- Yellow inoculation loops - Day 1 bag: LB agar powder & antibiotic - Sterile paintbrushes - Inactivation bag

Microwave

It's important to use sterile water when you create your LB agar plates because if there are any other microorganisms in the water, they’ll grow too!

Got it

LB is food for bacteria. Agar makes the LB form into a jelly-like solid so your bacteria can grow on the surface of it. LB contains sugar (glucose), tryptone (amino acids), and yeast extracts.

Petri dishes are the containers that you grow bacteria in. You will pour your molten LB agar into the petri dishes and let it solidify. Petri dishes are also sometimes called plates.

Antibiotics are added to molten LB agar to make the media “selective”. You need selective plates when you grow these colorful bacteria. This makes sure only these bacteria grow in your experiment.

When doing science such as this you should wear gloves (latex, nitrile). You do this to protect you from your experiments and your experiments from you!

As you do the simulator, click on objects. There might be hidden information!

Your water is not yet boiling! You need to see a rolling boil or your LB agar will not dissolve!

Microwave a bit longer

You need a microwave to boil your sterile water. Having boiled sterile water will make sure your LB Agar powder will dissolve properly. It is really important to make sure your water is fully boiling before you add your LB agar powder!

The DNA Playground has incubation capabilities that you need to grow your bacteria at the right temperature!

Make your pallette

A sterile inoculating loop is used to touch some bacteria that you received in the form of a “Stab" and streak them onto the LB agar. Careful not to touch the loop end (the circular end). You’ll contaminate it!

2. Grow Paint Pallette

Laboratory bacteria, also called cells, can be kept alive in many ways. The bacterial cells you are working with here are provided as a “stab”. Stabs named this way because the cells were stabbed into some soft LB agar in a tube. Bacterial cells that are grown this way can live for several months. You will transfer some of the cells from the stab to amplify them on a Petri dish for later painting Laboratory E. coli (Escherichia coli) are not the same as the E. coli you might associate with bad hamburgers and infection. Lab E. coli don’t make healthy people sick. In fact, humans have lots of non-harmful E. coli in their guts to aid in the digestion of food and the creation of vitamins and amino acids. For this experiment, you’re using a well studied, non-pathogenic (not harmful) strain called K12. Almost every research and biotechnology lab in the world has used a version of this strain at some point in their research. Your colorful bacteria are pre-engineered to create colors. You can learn about engineering cells to have colors in our other Virtual Bioengineer simulators!

You did a great job making your LB agar plates and you’ll now use one of them to create your painters palette! You are leaving the rest in a fridge.

Got It

You touched the end of the loop!!! Now there are likely microorganisms on it. Get a new loop and please be careful next time.

It can take up to 30 minutes for it to reach the desired temperature. You can put your plates in the incubator even if the temperature is not yet reached. It is time to make your painting palette.

Streak your Palette

7. Incubate Cells

4. Transform Cells

2. Grow Blank Cells

5. Recover Cells

Engineer-It kit

3. Make Cells Competent

Start by turning on your Incubator to 37 ℃ so that it is warm when you need it! Do you know why E. coli bacteria are grown at 37 ℃?

6. Plate Cells

Do you want to waste electricity!?? The Cold Station uses 40W electricity, so why turn it on when you don’t need it? Turn on the 37 C Station.

K12 like E. coli live in the intestines of animals and like body temperature! Temperature of 42 ℃ is equivalent to a fever in a human body which is designed to kill microbes and puts stress on their survival! Turn on the 37 ℃ Station.

K12 E. coli live in the intestines of animals and like body temperature! It will take an extra day to grow them at 30 ℃. Turn on the 37 ℃ Station.

Use the loop and streak cyan cells from 1A-1E. Unlock the next clean loop by clicking on the discard bin.

With your LB agar petri dish open, you will want to streak the surface of the LB agar with the bacteria that are on the loop.

Use a new loop and streak magenta cells from 2A-2E. Unlock the next clean loop by clicking on the discard bin.

Use another new loop and streak purple cells from 3A-3E. Discard the loop by clicking on the discard bin.

Put your streaked petri dish onto your incubator paddle. Your incubator paddle will help you to insert your petri dish into your DNA Playground!

Put Humidity Chamber Ovover

Slide the Paddle Under

Insert Into DNA Playground

Your petri dish is on your paddle and it is now covered by the humidity chamber. It is now ready to insert into the DNA Playground!

Almost there...

Insert the Petri dish

Open the Incubator!

Let your cells grow for 24hrs!

Close the Incubator

Turn on your DNA Playground Incubator

Bacteria “Paintbrushes"

Stencils

4. Paint living Canvas

Painting pallette

Just like when growing your painting pallette, you’ll need to incubate your bioart using the incubator of the DNA Playground

Included in your Canvas Kit are some tools that will help you collect cells from your palette, and paint them onto your LB agar petri dish. Toothpicks act like a “fine point pen”, whereas cotton swabs create much wider brush strokes. If you have loops left in your kit you can also use them!

You’ll need your painting palette for painting your board! If for some reason you don’t get all the colors growing, you can try collecting cells directly from the tube of cells.

You are going to need another LB agar petri dish that you made earlier. However, this time you’ll be growing your bioart on it!

Painting with bacteria is a very challenging activity. It is easy to do, but hard to do well. Using stencils is a great way to learn how painting with bacteria works. As with all art and science disciplines, practice makes perfect, and bioart is no exception. A blank stencil allows you to draw a picture on it and then trace that picture on your bioart by placing your petri dish over top. The pre-drawn stencil can also be used if you want to get going quickly.

You can directly use a pre-made stencil, or you can use a pencil or pen to draw a picture on the “blank” stencil. Pro-tip: you can plan which color of bacteria you will use as you draw.

I’m ready to paint

Just like for growing your pallette, you’ll need your DNA Playground incubator for keep your cells at a perfect 37 °C. Turn on the incubator to 37 °C.

While your incubator is heating up, its time to make bioart!

Create your stencil

Place your petri dish onto your stencil

You’re now ready to start painting by tracing your stencil. Note that if you want to paint free-hand, you totally can!

Flip the Plate

Alright! You’ve completed your painting. It is time to flip your plate and incubate.

Trace the pink area of the stencil image with the paintbrush you dipped in the magenta paint. You don’t need many cells on your brush to be successful - if you see the actual colored cells on your palette plate, there are plenty! Painting with bacteria is like using invisible ink: you won’t see your drawing right away but as you incubate the Petri dish, the cells will grow, divide and become visible. Once you are finished with the magenta paintbrush put it in your discard container by clicking on the bin.

Dip your “paintbrush” into the magenta colored cells so that you can begin painting!

Great! You’re ready to start painting!

Yes! I’m ready to paint

Put your streaked Petri dish onto your incubator paddle. Your incubator paddle will help you to insert your petri dish into your DNA Playground!

Put the Humidity Chamber Over

Slide the Paddle under

Your Petri dish is on your paddle and it is now covered by the humidity chamber. It is now ready to insert into the DNA Playground!

Insert into the DNA Playground

Insert Petri dish

Amazing! It has been 48 hours and the petri dish you traced with bacteria has grown into a living art piece. The colours from the bacteria paint are now bright since you incubated the bacteria in their preferred environment: with nutritious agar, in a warm 37 °C, and with the petri dish upside down to preserve moisture. You’ve learned a lot. Good job!

What's next?

Just like for growing your pallette, you’ll need your DNA Playground incubator for keep your cells at a perfect 37 °C. Turn on the incubator to 37 °C.

Congratulations !

Discover more activities

You are now a Bioartist! If this free simulator was informative and helpful in learning about bioart and biotechnology, share it with your friends. We hope to help millions to learn about biotechnology!

Discover more activities

Use the loop and streak cells from 1A-1E. Unlock the next clean loop by clicking on the discard bin. Repeat with the remaining loops

It is time to mix the agar powder in the water by swirling the bottle back and forth! At the end of this step, the solution will be slightly yellow, but transparent (not cloudy).

Tap (or click) the bottle to swirl your agar!

To make sure you have enough bacteria paint to create your art, you will first make a painting palette on one of your petri dishes. You will streak the coloured bacteria from the tube onto the agar so that they can grow over the entire surface of the agar. Let’s start our painting palette.

I’m ready!

The first thing you’ll do is separate the area in 3 segments, since you have 3 paint colours: magenta, purple and cyan. Use the marker and create 3 sections on the bottom of the petri dish.

Flip the plate and get the cells

Perfect! You’ll streak one colour per area. Now, let’s flip our plate over and get our first colour of bacteria to steak onto this petri dish

LB agar is both the food that bacteria eat and a structure they grow on. LB agar is similar to Jell-O. You can pretend you are making bacteria Jell-O! When making LB agar, you first need to boil water. It’s important to loosen the lid on your water bottle before microwaving

Loosen the Lid

Time to Boil your Water

Your lid is loose so your bottle will not explode in the microwave!

For each color of bacteria you want in your art, repeat tracing the image with the paintbrush dipped in the paint. Trace the purple areas now with your paintbrushed dipped in purple bacteria paint. Click on the discard bin to drop the paintbrush in when you are done. Pro-tip: use one color per paintbrush, unless you want to create mixed effects in your art!

Okay!

Great Find! Good clickin’. Fun Fact Did you know that, despite popular belief, there are hundreds of different kinds of E. coli and only a couple strains of E. coli bacteria are pathogenic (bad for you)? You actually have E. coli in your large intestine and they are helping to digest your food and maintain intestinal health. You cannot make all the amino acids you need to survive and E. coli help you with this!

Great art, right? This bacteria art, or bioart, was created by a High School group using the Canvas Kit. The photo shows the art under blacklight, since some of the bacteria paints you will use are fluorescent. Here are some more of their work:

For your final touches, trace the cyan areas with your paintbrush dipped in cyan bacteria paint. Click on the discard bin to drop the paintbrush in when you are done. Pro-tip: agar is a soft surface - when you are painting with bacteria, it is important to be gentle so that you don’t puncture the agar!