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The Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology last week combined science and art through a unique semi-annual agar art competition.
The Agar Art Contest is held once in the fall semester and twice in the winter semester. Aimed to bring science to his BYU community in an accessible way, this competition allows everyone to try their hand at both art and science.
Current MMBIO Lab Administrator Robert Black said he began hosting the contest after University of Puget Sound’s Dr. Mark Martin visited campus in 2017.
During his visit, Martin shared how agar is used in Puget Sound and provided BYU’s lab with different types of bacteria. Martin also taught students how to use agar on a large scale, which led to his first Agar Art event at BYU six years ago.
After seeing the success of the first agar art contest, Black knew he had found something good and decided to hold the event again.
“Since then, we decided to keep the tradition and only do it twice a year,” Black said.
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Agar, Black explains, is a food source for translucent bacteria derived from algae. The six “paint” tubes the students used to create their designs contained a variety of colorful dyes, as well as a harmless genetically engineered strain of E. coli that glows in the dark.
When participants removed a paint brush from a particular tube, each brush stroke actually placed the bacteria that produced that color onto the agar plate. Once in the agar, the bacteria feed on the agar and begin to multiply. As the bacteria begin to grow, they begin to produce pigment.
“So they’re just colonizing different colored bacteria,” Black says.
This semester’s BYU Agar Art Competition theme follows the American Biological Society’s Agar Art Competition theme, “Microbiology in Space.” Black said the Microbiology Society holds a continent-wide agar contest every year.
The competition theme will guide participants’ designs. Professor Black plans to submit BYU’s winning design to compete with designs from other universities from Canada to South America.
Sydney Ride, a fourth-year art student at BYU who won the fall 2021 agar contest, believes agar art is more similar to traditional art mediums than some people think. In the case of agar, just like in art class, we don’t know how it will turn out in the end.
![](https://universe.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Sydney-Wride-1st-Place-Fall-2021-1.jpg)
“There’s something here for everyone to enjoy because you never know what’s going to happen. So it doesn’t really matter, we’re just having fun together, because no matter what we do… Because no one can see if it’s there,” Wide said.
Ride explained that the competition was also a kind of trigger for her to ask many science questions that she had never thought of before, since she is not a science student.
Another participant, Alaina Ean, is a British graduate. Een enjoys participating in these events, which she was not able to attend during her undergraduate years at BYU.
“BYU offers hundreds of different experiences, so I’m looking forward to trying a few more,” Ehn said.
Een believes that events like the Agar Art Contest are part of the unique and enriching opportunities that make BYU an experience, not just an education.
As he followed instructions and experimented with this new form of art, Ean gained respect for science students who were more knowledgeable about the process behind the art.
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Rachel David Prince, a PhD student from India, is an artist at heart. Although she comes from a science background, one of her passions is painting.
Prince had worked with agar in the MMBIO lab, but had never used a paintbrush. To participate in her agar art contest, she left her lab coat in her lab and brought only her artistic self.
“I’m not a scientist here…I’m not a researcher. I’m not a PhD student…I feel one among everyone,” Prince said.
Black said there is no rubric when judging the winners. The judges will not only consider the beauty of the photo, but also the effort put into it.
After the competition, the agar plates are taken back to the MMBIO laboratory to grow the bacteria. According to Black, if you keep the plate in an incubator for a day or two, the color will start to develop and a picture will start to appear.
The next Agar Art Contest will be held in March 2024.