Microbial Art

>>3000000
nice thread btw its interesting.

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>>3000379
>>3000384
This is actually a pretty interesting medium. I might ask around in the hospital I worked in as a teenager if they have petri dishes lying around. Or, what the fuck, you can basically just buy them and put different kinds of organic stuff on there. Literally everything has bacteria. Although you'd probably get a more mixed image then. The photos look like someone used cultures of different bacteria incubated beforehand.

t. someone who draws abstract cell images

Bacteria on a petri plate don't grow in designs like that. What they're doing is taking cultured bacteria and streaking them on the plate in that design, incubating it for 1-2 days, then staining them afterwards.

>>3000621
Oh, yeah, I thought that was clear. You have to put them into the shape you want and maybe even scratch away some as soon as they start to grow. I was talking about how someone got different cultures of bacteria for the colors.

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When you use random things to get your bacteria from it will basically look like this.

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Pic related is done with fluorescent proteins that have been expressed in organisms like e.coli. The equipment needed to do this is much more expensive than the novelty, though.
If you're going to do something like this, you'd have to swab whatever doorknob (or worse, your keyboard) and put it on a dish. You have to make sure the media doesn't have any amoxicillin in it. When whatever grows you have to put it on your design plate. You'd have to take a toothpick (blunt kind) and lightly swipe the colony that has the color you want and lightly caress the media to plate it in your design.
The OP's first image is of dendrites and nothing grows like that as someone else said. Common stuff grows like spores. Even in the top two images, the media's been contaminated with those white and brown spots.
You may be able to purchase e.coli strains (non-pathogenic) that already have been transfected with a color-producing protein. There's a blue one that colors the colony based on proteins in the media, I think. I've mostly worked with EGFP, so don't quote me. When working with fluorescent proteins, they're all going to go off at different wavelengths, so you have to have something that able to excite them.
Once again, the cost of petri dishes can get up there and if you're not careful, you're gonna make yourself sick because you're essentially harboring things that can make you pretty sick.

>>3000618
Plastic Petri dishes come in sleeves of about 20. You can use a basic "Nutrient Agar" to Cultivate a wide range of microbes. It comes ready as a dehydrated powder. Its made up of tryptone enzymatic digest, salt, beef extract, and agar to solidify it.
The biggest problem will be sterilizing your material, because otherwise fungal spores are ubiquitous and you'll get black mycellia and green fuzz everywhere. Is your knowledge at less than this basic level so I can keep going, or do you need a little more advanced info?

>>3000728
As far as bacterial cultures go, science supply vendors sell lyophilized bacteria that you can resuspend in sterile water. You might need to have some kind of business entity status or something so they can sell to you
Take a look on Carolina Science and ward's Science.

If you wanna do some really cool micro lab stuff you can isolate and make your own pure colonies of different bacteria with selective media and a bunch of different micro techniques but that'd be very expensive if you don't already have access to a school lab