Thank you to everyone who created a log phase masterpiece, to our esteemed judges, and to everyone who voted for People’s Choice on Facebook! We received 117 amazing entries from 26 countries and 17 U.S. states. Special congratulations to our winners! View this year’s winners, as well as winners from last year and other notable 2015 and 2016 entries, in the Agar Art Gallery at Microbe 2016.
1st Place – The first race
Fertilization is the first competitive event of plant and animal life. It is a process involving the fusion of male and female gametes to form a zygote. Millions of spermatozoa race and compete to be the first to penetrate the egg, but only one of them finally meets the egg and creates a zygote leading to the development of an embryo.
In this artwork, I used four bacteria as paint and a selective agar medium as canvas. The red colored paint was Staphylococcus aureus, which is an opportunistic pathogen in both humans and animals. The green color was Staphylococcus xylosus, a commensal organism in human skin, the white was Staphylococcus hyicus, an animal pathogen responsible for grassy pig disease. The yellow colored organism was Corynebacterium glutamicum, a non-pathogenic but industrially important bacterium for production of amino acids such as L-glutamate and L-lysine. Other colors were from mixture of two or more of these four organisms.
Md Zohorul Islam, DVM
Graduate Student
Department of Veterinary Disease Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Department of Microbiology and Infection Control, Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark
