Peak Proteins Enters The ASM Agar Art Contest

In the spirit of International Microorganisms Day (17th September) we have been inspired to enter the highly competitive American Society for Microbiology agar art contest, this year based on the theme “Microbiology in Space”. With our site based in Tytherington, so close to the UNESCO World Heritage Site Jodrell Bank Observatory, this is a theme close to many of our hearts! Scientists from all of our departments got involved in designing plates and some of them also joined in the fun in the microbial lab to have a go at performing their own microbial streaks.

Our agar plate of the iconic Jodrell Bank radio satellite dish

To make the background for our master pieces we have experimented with adding a variety of food colourings to the LB agar prior to autoclaving to obtain a more spacey grey background than the traditional yellow, as well as some brighter coloured planets.

At Peak Proteins our microbial scientists use E. coli as their protein expression system due to its growth speed and high level of soluble protein expression. In order to achieve different colours for the streaking patterns we have used one of our standard E. coli cell lines transformed with 2 different protein vectors. BL21 Gold E. coli containing one of our tool proteins produced our usual brown cells, whereas BL21 Gold E.coli transformed with a vector containing fluorescent protein mCherry gave us the potential to colour change these brown cells to purple.

To force the purple colouring of the mCherry transformed cells we added a low concentration of the chemical IPTG into the agar plates. This induced the expression of the colourful mCherry protein in the E. coli cells once they had colonised the plates.

Stocks of both transformed cells were used as paint and carefully streaked onto the agar plates using different sizes of sterile loops and pipette tips. Following a 24-hour incubation period we were able to see our designs come to life in the form of E. coli!