Painting in a petri dish: Indian researcher wins international award

Balaram Khamari makes microbial paintings with a substance called agar, and creators like him are known as agar artists

A microbiology researcher Balaram Khamari from Andhra Pradesh mixed his love for science and his fascination for art to make a microbial painting in a petri dish, which just won an international award.

Khamari, a doctoral fellow at Sri Sathya Sai deemed university, ‘painted’ the Microbial Peacock with three kinds of highly pathogenic bacteria and won second place in the American Society for Microbiology’s (AMS) annual agar art contest.

Khamari finds the process of agar painting nerve-wracking but it doesn’t take as long as one would expect. If the temperature is regulated, one microbial painting takes seven to eight hours. “It took many plates of rejected material before I finally ended up with the peacock that was my submission,” told Hindustan Times.

Agar is a jelly-like substance which is made from seaweed. Khamari makes his own agar by heating and cooling agar-agar powder. He then plants microorganisms on to the petri dish with small and thin metallic sticks with loops at the ends. He likens it to planting seeds in a garden, except in this case, you cannot see what you're planting. “Just as, in a garden, you arrange plants by how you plant their seeds, similarly, in agar, we ‘plant’ spots of the microbe and hope they will grow and follow the paths we’ve traced for them,” Khamari is quoted as saying by HT.

Artists select the microorganisms on the basis of how they want their end product to look like, for instance, if they need any colour in their creation or want it to grow in a particular way. Some bacteria have colour in them naturally while some bacteria like yeast and fungi add varied depths to a painting.

Khamari has worked to become an agar artist ever since he first heard of the medium. He has only been at it for a year and a half.

On ASM's website and social media, Khamari described his agar peacock as one that represented regality, beauty, prosperity and optimism.

"Various traditional art forms in India are inspired by the magnificent symmetric arrangement of the peacock’s plumage and its flexible neck... Here, the body of the peacock is made of Escherichia coli; and the individual tail feathers are an alternate arrangement between Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus, the two most commonly encountered human pathogens. The small colonies around the head of the peacock and the eyeball are made of Enterococcus faecalis, a gut bacterium that produces tiny and distinct colonies," the post read.