An artist is not always in complete control of their work. This may seem like an odd statement, but take for example a watercolor print. Part of the fun of watercolor as a medium is that the paint has the ability to take on a life of its own (especially when painting wet-on-wet); the artist merely facilitates the paint-water interaction. Then during the printing process, when the paper is pressed up against the glass, the paint again has the opportunity move in the absence of the painter’s brush. This is part of what makes watercolor exciting but also nerve wracking.
Now I find myself commencing on an artistic journey/ science experiment in which I have significantly less control then I ever have had in any other artistic endeavor I can remember. I am co-creating with my own microbiome. I am not the first person to treat the bacteria living on and in me as collaborators. However, as someone who has not grown bacteria cultures in a petri dish since high school I feel both the ever-curious biologist and the nervous grad student vying for attention inside me.
My DIY agar recipe was fairly straightforward. I took four store-bought gelatin leaves and one chicken stock cube and prepared them as the respective packages instructed. I took ten small petri dishes and labeled each for the part of my body from which a planned to take a sample: eyelid, nose, ear, scalp, inside of check, back of tongue, teeth, navel, hand, and foot. When the agar was ready, I poured it into the ready-labeled dishes, and let them cool until they set (I placed them in the fridge for a bit to speed up the process). Once they were set enough that they just barely jiggled when shaken, I used q-tips to swab the various parts of my body and dragged the q-tips gently across the agar. I then taped the lids shut and placed all the dishes on top the refrigerator.
I have done some research since then into what kind of bacteria I may expect to find on the plates, and I discovered that many of them are likely to grow all-white colonies… in retrospect, perhaps I should have dyed the agar a different color than the pale yellow that they are. Oh well, maybe next time. A few days after I started the cultures, I checked the plates and could not see anything growing, so I moved some of the plates to the top of the stove hood, in hopes that it would be a bit warmer.
Even though it is the gut microbiota that have been implicated in depression, there is significant evidence that the gut microbiome affects the skin microbiome as well. Basically, the human body is an interconnected whole, and the bacteria living on and in us are part of that whole. Therefore, I decided it was still relevant to my microbiome/mood research to take samples from various parts of my skin. In my next post, I will share about the beginning of my endeavor to grow my own skin analog using kombucha.
Microbial Mood 