Jasmine Temple had a very special partner for her prize-winning art project: pigment-producing yeasts. Temple, a lab technician at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, has won the third annual Agar Art contest, a competition organised and juried by members of the American Society for Microbiology that asks contestants to create works of art from microbes grown on an agar plate (a petri dish that contains a growth medium). The competition was “a perfect outlet to create something in tune with my biological interests, in relation to yeast genetics, and also to create something that pertains to my artistic aesthetic”, says Temple, who has been studying pigment-producing yeast strains for over a year. For her prize-winning project, Temple used nano-sized droplets of various yeasts, which grow rapidly into pigments of different colours, to create a coastal sunset scene inspired by Montauk, New York. All 265 submissions to this year’s competition have been photographed and are displayed on the organisation’s Facebook page—the only way to preserve these ephemeral works of art, which retain their colour for six months to a year before they begin to fade.
