fertilised egg shell shattered and spilt the 3 day old embryo.

opened up egg showing a 5 day embryo in the top left hand corner

 DISSECTIONS:

I’ve been collecting wild webs from in between rails and bringing them back to the lab in preperation for another cycle of tissue culture.

My methodology is crude to say the least, but it works. I’m using cable ties to make loops that I capture the frames with. I’ve also invited anyone else to collect webs and to send them to me, so if you’d like to contribute, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

On one of the webs I accidentally caught a spider which I was unsuccessful in releasing

 The next stage will be to sterilise them and then to decide how best to culture onto them and which cells. Most likely I’ll try to culture each cell line individually onto the silks and then some co-cultures.

Perhaps some in liquid media and some on agar.

We’re also going to make some biopsies from chick embryos and tissue culture with them, possibly onto the silks.

An article in New Scientist, Hybrid Hearts Could Solve Transplant Shortage.

rat heart stripped of it’s cells and ‘reclothed’ with stem cells from another rat.

 or a re-celled rat’s heart (Image downloaded from the New Scientist site and courtesy of the University of Minnesota)

This is a bioreactor profusion pump.

I’m utterly seduced by how incredibly beautiful this image is - and the  engineering. The procedure sounds like one similar to ‘Claudia’s tachea‘, except that the trachea was from a human donor - and implanted into a human called Claudia. The idea of non human animal = virtually limitless supply is fraught with difficulty from my point of view.

See the video here.

These images really do fulfill a kind of contemporary gothic, fueled by biotech anxieties.  The image has strong resonances of photographic representations of TC &A’s Victimless Leather whose framing, lighting and installing deliberately invoke a simimilar gothic aesthetic but one that is deployed in radically different directions. Victimless Leather asks profoundly provocative questions that assume nothing in reagrad to the use and coption of living bodies and materials as resourse, it both sets up and dismantles utopian dreams of that appropriation of life can ever exist outside of power chains that exploit one way or another - depending where on the food chain you are.

But I also wanted to put this image up a a great example of a bioreactor. Here is the Victimless Leather one as well.

When researching art works that use fat for the previous entry I remembered INCUBRA, and it’s take on creating convivial environments of cell cultures.

INCUBRA, Fiannaca/Versparget, 2007

 INCUBRA exploits the body’s natural 37 degree temperature - which of course in vitro bodies require as much as incorporated ones. I’m not sure how they did the CO2 though. Perhaps they didn’t. It has to be the most glamerous wearable lab kit I’ve ever seen.

sodium bicarbonate for CO2 with tartaric acid, maybe add a weak acid vinager or lemon juice - then use to bake soda bread

hygrometer - in wine making - measures water, used to release Co2, equals pressure, can put anti backterial in it.
Pressure valve provides pressure.

glass tube, bung - 2 holes
equaliser
stand
motor
spindle
stand
hybridisation oven @ 37, westerns, dna, rna, protein sticking, used for

spindle movement of bioreactor
rotating, easiest
double spindle movement back and forth as in distaff and spindle for twisting thread
(Janet’s describing this whilst handling a spindle and giving me wool to culture onto)

in diving technologies chemical scrubbers remove CO2

workshop
glassblower

mechano

William Morris - arts and crafts

crows and cell scrappers
rooks and scapers
ravens and broom sticks

more difficult to find food in more changeable climates
anthropomorphic interpretations, human centricities pretending impartial objectifications

Jackie - crow paper in Nature
Graham Martin

Later, espresso in garden, imaginings of further third spaces

Tissue culture laboratories at the bottom of gardens that occupy the garden shed territory, not just to potter and tinker but to think and make and write (poetry in), next to the mutiple organisms of the garden and adjacent to the kitchen with it’s biotechnologies and crafts  of cooking, baking, fermenting.

lists and ides text superimposed onto a paper

A very simple trick to produce controlled CO₂ concentrations in the gas phase overlying cell cultures

On Saturday, before I went into the lab to do tissue culture (see previous entry) I did some DIY biotech at home, using technology somewhat older than tissue culturing I baked bread using a commercially available bakers yeast. Yeast is one of the most common and undesirable contaminants in tissue culture, guaranteed to compete with the cells for the goodies in tissue culture medium it will lay havoc with the delicate cell culture ecology and destroy it. So it’s status is radically redefined between the spaces of my home kitchen and the university research lab, from essential organic componant to contaminant.

I was careful to not carry any into the tissue culture room with me on my hands or clothing however it made me very conscious of the presence of everyday airborne yeasts and as Janet later pointed out, the yeast incubator that is adjacent to her lab. There’s also a fruit fly lab next door where vast amounts of yeasty materials are cultured to as fly food. The tissue culture hood and the extended tissue culture room itself is an architecture of filtered air flows designed to keep airborne contaminants out.

I would like to culture the bread yeast and take a look at it and in doing so to explore the possibilities of third spaces, neither the domestic nor the research laboratory, where I can explore yeasts and cells cultures, for a moment suspending both of their defined framings. And perhaps to capture and cultivate some airborne yeasts. I’d like to tackle sourdough bread baking and the idea of making my own starter from yeasts in my environment appeals to the idea of local ecologies and the permeabilities we enact with organisms through our domestic practices. Perhaps I can make a wild sourdough starter from wild (?) laboratory yeasts. Janet has added beer making and compost making to the list of exhanges between domestic biotech and The Lab. She uses bokashi to break down in her kitchen to break down waste into garden nutriants.