Figure 1. WTF: Wave,Temperature, and Frequency, Digital image of cyanobacterial image on synthetic felt (2020) © rcbeck.com
PHOTOSYNTHETIC IMAGE GENERATION: Co-Cultured Autotrophic-Heterotrophic Color Controls for Bacteria Based Imagery HTGAA TA’s: Danny Chen, Inger Le Gué, Juan Diego Unda, Digby Usher
SECTION 1: ABSTRACT: Currently, biological art and engineered living material systems are often based on heterotrophic microorganisms such as E. coli, which require continuous external nutrient supplementation to function. In contrast this project looks at cyanobacteria as a potential solution to nutrient supply since they are capable of using light and CO₂ to naturally generate organic carbon through photosynthesis. However, cyanobacteria is less suitable for engineering visual outputs. The goal of this project is to combine cyanobacteria and E. coli into a synthetic co-culture, where cyanobacteria generates sucrose to support engineered E. coli for the production of chromo-proteins in a continuously recirculating visual media system.