25¢ Digital Biology is a collaborative canvas inspired by experiments in online art like r/place. You choose the color and position of each pixel. On June 1st, we send the final artwork to be printed in living bacteria.
The canvas is a 1536-well microplate with 48 columns and 32 rows. Pixels start out black, meaning no bacteria will be grown in that space.
The palette is six engineered fluorescent proteins, each expressed in Escherichia coli. Contributors can assign a color or lock in a pixel as black.
Each pixel will be sold only once. The choices made by each painter are permanent.
On June 1st we send the final image, whatever it is, to be printed in live bacteria. We use the Ginkgo Bioworks cloud lab to produce the final artwork and collect the digital print.
Cells are spotted onto agar plates in a precise grid matching the digital canvas. The agar plates are incubated, photographed under UV, and used to produce the final composite image.
