Bureaucrats, emailconfirmed, Administrators
5,476
edits
GMU:DIY Biolab “Driver’s License”/DNA extraction (view source)
Revision as of 19:41, 31 October 2017
, 31 October 2017→Related Scientific and Artistic Projects
| Line 56: | Line 56: | ||
*http://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/sterile | *http://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/sterile | ||
*http://www.artscatalyst.org/sterile-sensei-ichi-go | *http://www.artscatalyst.org/sterile-sensei-ichi-go | ||
===Joe Davis, Microvenus=== | |||
[[File:microvenus-unmondemoderne.wordpress.jpg|thumb|Fig. 6. Microvenus. Source: http://unmondemoderne.wordpress.com ]] | |||
Microvenus is a genetically modified Escherichia coli bacteria strain carrying a piece of synthetically composed sequence of amino acid molecules. It was first cloned into several laboratory strains of E. coli in collaboration with molecular geneticist Dana Boyd at Jon Beckwith’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 1988. As bacteria is small and invisible for the human eye, the artwork instead of being “aesthetic” is rather imaginable. Davis introduces the Microvenus as follow: | |||
"Each Microvenus organism contains many copies of a special molecule designed by the artist and his colleagues. The artistic molecule is a short piece of synthetic DNA containing a coded visual icon that has been incorporated into a living strain of bacteria (E. Coli)." (Davis 1996). | |||
The coded icon is a symbol of life from a germanic rune. Resembling letter Y it also represents a female earth in different mythologies. The graphical image was converted into the bit-map image and further into DNA base pairs in order to synthetically program and attach to the original DNA code of the plasmids carried by bacteria (Fig. 6.). Davis has imagined that the code might be interpreted by extraterrestrials as the final stage of the project was supposed to include shipping of the modified bacteria into the universe. | |||
Microvenus is interesting from different perspectives. First of all it is the first genetically modified art work. Secondly, Davis’ idea to encode and store data into the DNA in the end of 80s was a couple of decades ahead of a scientific project presented by CUHK team at the iGEM competition in 2010.* Finally, thinking of extraterrestrial intelligence, it probably makes sense to think of communication happening at the very nature of life, within the chemical interactions between different molecules. So encoding and reading genetical information, might give many answers about different life forms. | |||
*Davis, J. (1996). "Microvenus". Art Journal. 55 (1): 70–74. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/777811 | |||
*http://2010.igem.org/Team:Hong_Kong-CUHK | |||
==Terms== | ==Terms== | ||