This conversation about bioreactors and incubators was a tangent to a conversation with Mel Grant yesterday about another tissue culture project.

Mel had a couple of thoughts re: the rotating bioractor idea (as well as talk to Eric)

Tumbler

Gyroscope

Made me think about enclosed spaces and different materials, environments and so on, and the polymer bioreactors of Zbigniew Oksiuta

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.

I just put some SHSYSY cells - which are a neuroblast cell line onto silk fibres, in preparation for working with them on spider silk. I’m enjoying the movement of language between the materials, circulation of signs and tipping of relations as the fibres are tiwsted and tangled in my foreseps, placed into wells and the nervy solution poured on with a pipette.

The airflow within the hood played havoc with the fragile wisps of silken fibres, I really need to figure out a better way of handling them, or to at least practice. Twisting the silky bits into tangles with the foreseps resembles some tiny crafty practice. The tangles are slight and beautiful and inclined to move out of the well onto the underside of the lid, perhaps reacting to slight static charges.

The cells were confluent and I counted and failed yet again to work out the cell solution, I hazarded a guess which I felt was realistic and wondered at my blankness and inability to master this pretty simple numerical manouver. I also wondered at not trying, perhaps to work with another number system, something utterly outside of trying to count and dilute and getting it right.

I was horribly clumsy tonight, as much as I find the tooing and froing of movement and fluency of ritual around the tissue culture hood,  I dropped and fumbled and grew anxious.

Nervy silks, silken nerves, the word play reminds me again of the J.G. Ballard short story in which garments retain emotional residues and imprints of their wearers, empathetic and traumatised by past violences. They ripple and undulate as anxious tissues of material memories.

The osteoblast like cell we are using is called MC 3T3-E1, it’s a fibroblast like cell that has proved to be fragile and fussy in it’s proliferation, unlike some of the other cell line we’ve been using on the project. Normally a confluent culture of cells are detached and disaggregated using trypsin, a digestive enzyme pancreatic in origin, however we are now using dispase. The MC 3T3 E1’s seem to resisit trypsin and finally detach but then take a long time to reestablish with any conviction once replated.

Janet has used dispase in some of the muscle cell cultures she’s worked on and one of the advantages is that the cells will detach in clusters whcih might then work well for seeding onto the 3-D scaffolds, cells attached to cells that are being manipulated to attach to a surface might work better than vulnerable single cells.

Invitrogen advertise it is as a gentler alternative to trypsin, which makes it sound like a domestic cleaning product. Dispase is a  protese, an enzyme that breaks peptide chains, it cleaves fibronectine and collagen IV, and the kind we use is isolated from the bacteria Bacillus polymyxa. Dispase is used in skin tissue culture to separate the dermis from the epidermis, this ability to seperate is exploited in biopsies to seprate keratinocutes from fibroblast, and when culturing ketatinocytes on a layer of 3T3 feeder cells. The 3T3’s express some of the contextual material or growth factors and proteins (extra cellular matrix) required for the ketatinocytes to thive, which are then isolated form the ‘feeder’ layer.

Cleave is the accepted default word for this process in relation to dispase,  and yet it has a wonderful dual usage, i.e. to cling or to stick to, to remain faithful to, or to sever, split, separate. Cloven, cleft, cleavage, all indicate splittage and indentations prior to divisions and separations, but this other dynamic impulse in to cleave remarks a counter point, a critical thrust that enables some kind of structural integrity, a suspension perhaps.

The method Janet used was to apply the dispase, I think about 1 ml to the confluent culture in one small tissue culture flask, leave for 40 minutes and then using a cell scrapper, literally mechanically scrap the cells up. In otehr situations one could do a partical passage of cells this way which is nice.

I’m imagining a series of rotating bioreactors designed by

Louise Bourgeoise
De Selby
Kathy Acker
David Cronenburg
William Burroughs
Angela Carter
JG Ballard
Honour Fell
Lois Fuller
John Cage
Maya Deren
Cathy de Monchaux
Helen Chadwick
Groucho Marx
Rebecca Horne

and the list goes on and on

as part of Marina Abramovic Presents . . .

falling down the stairs backwards over four hours, repeated daily for 17 days
one descent per day

From the top, your flights of stairs go:
7 short
1 long step
9 short
1 turning long step
5 short
1 turning long step
9 short
1 long step
9 short
(FLOOR)

as written by Mary Griffiths, contemporary art curator, Whitworth Gallery

riser: 16 cms        6 1/2 inches
tread: 31.75 cm    12 1/2 inches

Stone steps
flights
wooden banisters with iron spindles
The stone stairs are smooth and slippery, no real purchase
if I really fall down, I’ll break my neck, there is a fabulous set of banister rails that I think I’ll use to grasp as I make my descent.

The movement needs to be so very slow, allowing for gradual progression, but there needs to be rest points, still points, especially for the hands which will get tired with the grasp.
So I need to find ways to come down, to be upside down alot in a kind of legs over head, to do that on a descent, and to sustain.

I’m concerned to find
• ways of moving that protect my neck – as well as everything else
• Ways of organising skeletal frame on the stairs to create balances that can be moved between like lots of svangasana (shoulder stand) to halasana (legs over head)
• Ways to prepare from now until the piece begins
• Ways to warm up before each daily session
• Ways to warm down and address aches and pains that allow for the next day

At the moment I’m imagining making the work naked
The skin slipping on stone is an issue but I think fabric is more hazardous and skin leaves slight marks, the stone/skin pressure will presumably redden the skin
I would like there to be a cumulative effect, so that someone coming in on day 11 will have a sense of build up, of a deposit of effort, or of travel.

Artists I’ve had or am about to have conversations with into and around this developing this work are:

Fiona Wright

Amanda Brown

Doran George

Yann Marussich

Empress Stah

 sKu-mNyé

Iyengar Yoga, asana and pranayama practices

 Here are a couple of pages on the history of the gallery and about it’s unique and special position in the history of Manchester.

It’s founding vision emrged out of the Arts and Crafts movement to  ‘Secure a source of perpetual gratification to the people of Manchester & and cultivate taste and knowledge of the Fine Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.’

Meanwhile, MS3T3-E1 cells (boney type cells) are on 3-D scaffolds from Rachel Sammons, Janet has managed to get a sturdy culture of the fussy MC’s established and she seeded the scaffolds on Monday. I brought up PD50As (muscle) and SYSHSH (nerve) from -70 (they should of been in liquid nitrogen but somehow they weren’t and they’re OK) and we are culturing those to layer ontop of the saffolds and bone next week.

We wondered about rotating bioreactors to spread the distribution of the bone cells on the 3-D scaffolds, but the muscle cells probably wouldn’t like this, they need to fix.

Here’s an image of TC&A using a rotating bioreactor when working on the 1/4 scale extra ear with Stelarc.

Here is a beautiful little video of blood cells forming. It’s part of a general circulation of ideas that are being provoked here in the residency at the School of Biosciences. I came across whilst reading an article in The Scientist about how physical, mechanical forces contribute to blood cell formation. The beat of the heart helps form blood stem cells. This relationship between physical force and cell development is something Janet has also spoken about regarding muscle cell forming. Janet suggested we look at patch clamping which I’d never heard of before but effectively it allows an electrical current to be measured. Here and here are other links to articles about it.

This is also the case with muscle cell formation. I was reminded of a conversation with Adam Zaretsky whilst in Mexico during which he suggested putting muscle cell culture under physical stresses, or in his words, get them to do yoga - knowing that I am a regular yoga practitioner. So I’m reviving that idea in conversations with Janet. It reminds me of other kinds of stress forces artists and scientists have worked with, including Adam who trialed the Humperdink Effect caused by playing Engelbert Humperdink to bacteria for two days.

The patch clamp thinking also came whilst talking about working with muscle and gold. I’m interested to work with gold and cell culture and have been for a while. Mel Grant and I hope to place gold particles into fat cells and I wondered about culturing muscle onto gold. Mel sent me this paper on embedding particles within cells without disrupting their membranes. And colloidal gold.

The culturing onto gold has been stirring for a while, I had a discussion with Cait, a PhD candidate in chemical engineering who is culturing e-coli onto gold, also I took a look at Paul Thomas’ Midas Project in which he cultures skin cells onto gold. Here is a paper on culturing skeletal muscle cells onto a gold surface. The paper identifies the applications for tissue engineering and architectures between the conductive organic and non organic materials.

The gold fat cell project makes a play between metaphors and materials, preciousness and scale. One possible cell type to use is the cell line: 3T3 L1, derived from 3T3, fibroblasts, or connective tissue. It’s an adipose like cell line, or a fat like cell, a model as it were. Fat cells can also be developed from muscle stem cell, there is a molecular switch that can cause the developmental cascade of a myoblast (muscle stem cell) on a muscle cell formation pathway (myogenic)  to switch to a fat cell pathway (adipogenic).

Here’s a reverse view and anti fat application>

Note to self: look up MyoD (muscle regulatory factor - MRF) and PPA gamma - important in the expression of genes for muscle formation.

What often happens when I’m in the School of Biosciences is that I get lots of tiny bits of wonderful information, quick and concise lectures on molecular biology, genetics, developmental biology, anatomy biochemistry etc. that I partially understand but have no real context for. The good thing about that is it allows me to dance with allot of ideas, the obvious shortcoming is that I have no mastery of any of these knowledges. I grab bits of information from conversations and papers, and from practical work in the lab, which I never do enough of but I potter along with nonetheless. The discussions get cut up with references to books in particular, films and art works. For example Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, his idiosyncratic scientist De Selby who’s experiments occupy a subtext of pages of footnotes,  Alfred Jarry and paterphysics, Angela Carter, Laurence Sterne, Marina Warner, Alice Oswald, Judith Butler, Joan Roughgarden, Walter Benjamin and the list goes on.