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Bacteriophone: Microbial Wallpapers

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American



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I take a lot of photos of bacteria on my phone, and sometimes I use those pictures as my phone's wallpaper. These photos are meta-phone bacteria wallpapers: photographs of bacteria that I collected off the surface of my phone (h/t to Nick for the microbial inspiration). To sample the phone's microbiome I simply placed it on a plate of fresh LB agar and incubated for two weeks at 30 degrees Celsius. Click for higher resolution.

Christina Agapakis is a biologist, designer, and writer with an ecological and evolutionary approach to synthetic biology and biological engineering. Her PhD thesis projects at the Harvard Medical School include design of metabolic pathways in bacteria for hydrogen fuel production, personalized genetic engineering of plants, engineered photosynthetic endosymbiosis, and cheese smell-omics. With Oscillator and Icosahedron Labs she works towards envisioning the future of biological technologies and synthetic biology design.

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