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Selfmade: Making Cheese on the Microbial Superhighway

Cheese is a fascinating model for studying the intersection of human and microbial cultures. My project with Sissel Tolaas explores these connections through the process of making cheese using microbes sampled from the human body.

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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Cheese is a fascinating model for studying the intersection of human and microbial cultures. My project with Sissel Tolaas explores these connections through the process of making cheese using microbes sampled from the human body. Here is a short film for the project featuring interviews with microbiologist Benjamin Wolfe, cheesemaker Seana Doughty, anthropologist Heather Paxson, and writer Michael Pollan.

The video and our cheese is currently part of Grow Your Own...Life After Nature, an exhibition on the future of biological design at the Science Gallery in Dublin.

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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