DATA

Do you see the blue pigment?!

  • Pigment

    This is the first time I have documented blue pigment. In the beginning, I was told by Carole Rehkugler (retired microbiologist at Cornell), that blue pigment is rare (she said something like, blue is the most energy-valuable wavelength so most organisms will use the energy in the blue instead of ‘frittering’ it away.).

  • Genes

    In 2017, Dan Beiting and I were both judges for the BioDesign Summit hosted at MoMA. At lunch, we began a collaboration to isolate DNA from my mud paintings for sequence analysis. The first 29 samples found over 800 genus, some not yet catalogued (speaking more to our ignorance of microbes than any ‘discovery’). I have caught the bug! In fall 2022 I broke open a pair of paintings (+/-biochar, a proposed greenhouse gas mitigating material). With the help of Jen Grenier at the Cornell Biotechnology Resource Center, I isolated and sequenced the rDNA with 3 primer sets to see bacteria and archaea. See preliminary results, below!

  • Community

    The end goal is to engage human communities to become curious about microbial communities: to learn from these first lifeforms surviving three billion years of earthly delights across time and space with their nimble genetic expression.

    Microbes are poets of matter.

What Jen Grenier & I discovered, Nov 2022.

Ok. so I’m learning

  • with Dan, I learned there are a ton of species.

  • with my brother, I learned my column is mostly anaerobic (reducing)

In planning for my next rDNA analysis, I asked Jen G to help me find some primers to make sure we are getting not just Bacteria but also Archaea ribosomal DNA!

CONCLUSION: you get what you look for (in some cases, 20% are Archaea!).

  • the Archaea primer set found Archaea!

  • the other 2 commonly used rDNA primers set barely amplified Archaea!

What Coburn Wightman & I discovered in 2022.

It is known that a Winogradsky Column sets up an oxic to anoxic gradient - but I didn’t actually know where or when that happened in a mud painting. So with tremendous help from my brother (read, he did it all!) we deployed pH, eH, and temperature sensors in 2 mud paintings installed inside Mann Library in 2022. 3 probes at 3 depths all well below the mud:water interface.

Looking at just the eH probes - the mud was pretty anoxic (reducing) quite early and through out most of the column! Now I know!

According to Murray McBride (Cornell emeritus, personal communication), a saturated system will be reducing within an inch of the mud:water interface. Note to self: ASK MORE QUESTIONS.

What Dan Beiting & I discovered, 2017

It takes a community to make one pigment!

Basic hypothesis: a pigmented section (e.g. red) will be dominated by a species that makes that pigment.

Each bar represents 1 of the 40 samples we took (29 were viable) selected for a visually coherent ‘color’ by our human eyes. What we found was that each one of the samples had 30-100 different species (e.g. “red”-what a folly!). Of course it takes a community to make pigment (it’s the same for us - yes, you can go harvest pigment in your soils or your local art store - but it still took all kinds of information, access, other humans, landscapes, and infrastructure.)! It’s easy to think that is ‘common sense’ AFTER you do all the work to ‘discover’ that. But this is why science is great - you have an idea and you test it. and for me, most of the time I say ‘doh!’. Then the next round of questions clamor in!