Photograph clicked at the MDEF room, IaaC Barcelona
TERM I
Bio and Agri Zero
Back in the senior year for my school, I had studied Science and specifically Biology as my major, but it always felt like I didn't invest enough time and effort to appreciate it. It was only a few years back that I actively started making science a part of my practice, as a lens and mode of research. This module reminded me how exciting, introspective, transformative and political, Science could be.
Bacterial Mediums
The module began with exploration and introspection through basic building blocks of cellular life and the concept of ‘Cellular Existence’. To understand how biology and cellular life is embedded way deeper into our lives than we think, we prepared bacterial mediums to grow our own bacterias. Many samples from surfaces, places and even dustbins around us were collected to study. My hypothesis for these slides was an intriguing question that I always had while discarding the organic waste from my kitchen:
Yogurt and eggs are the two top consumables in my house. Which one of those two causes the lingering smell in the organic waste bag before disposal?
For the study, an auxetic medium using tomato juice, bovril and agar was prepared. This medium is an ideal space for Lactobacillus, which is a genus of Gram-positive, aerotolerant anaerobes or microaerophilic, rod-shaped, non-spore-forming bacteria. This bacteria is found in many things we consume but most abundantly in yogurt. After letting this medium rest under a suitable temperature and humidity for 5 days, the colony formations were observed. The colony growth around the egg-shell probe was much more fragmented and filamentous, while the one with the yogurt was more situated on the swipe.
Various other types of mediums to study Spirulina farming and Kombucha scoby were also explored. All these studies gave us an insight into democratizing biology and making it open-source. These discussions led us further in understanding synthetic biology and how biologically optimized design could just save the planet. Various processes and advancements like Polymerase Chain Reaction, CRISPR-Cas9 and VetBact were discussed and studied.
Genetically Optimized Mutant
For the Mutant Design exercise, I have tried imagining the futures of Genetic Veganism. In terms of environmentalism and climate change mitigation, veganism is effective in lowering one’s personal carbon-footprint. As an already observable mega-trend, many people are inclining towards veganism as a way to contribute towards planetary well-being. Most of the vegan revolution is focused around reducing emissions from the meat industry by avoiding meat and animal-sourced products entirely. In possible futures, shortages of food and other resources might lead to the rise of food deserts. Living in a food desert might also become a barrier in following the vegan-lifestyle. When people would live miles away from the nearest grocery store, making the trip to purchase healthy, fresh produce might get difficult when cheaper options would be available closer to home.
In this day and age, many people find it difficult and conflicting to maintain a vegan diet because of induced cravings and nutritional deficiencies. In a near possible future, the market might get populated with alternatives that would help ‘induce’ or ‘inject’ vegan lifestyle within the already existing human bodies and eco-systems. This might lead to the rise of the next phase of veganism as ‘Genetic veganism’ or ‘Induced veganism’. For this study, I’m planning on exploring the future of veganism from a genetic perspective.
For the Synopsis, I chose the paper titled, 'Biomineral armor in leaf-cutter ants'. I tried deriving my correlations within the paper, to express my fascination and interest in arthropod ecosystems from Jonathan's class. Ant colonies are often seen as a metaphor for human-societies. Many Scientists have been studying their physical and social behaviour since 1882. Various researches have revealed an entire hidden network of communication and science beneath the surface of the ground that we walk on everyday. These ecosystems are very similar and coherent to the modern principles of urbanism and design of our current world. The species studied for this paper is Acromyrmex echinatior, also known as ‘leaf-cutter ants’. The focus of this paper lies on the multiple environmental factors and experiments that contribute to the development of biomineral armor in these ants, and how it could possibly be bio-mimicked someday.
