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Introduction

Men have always wanted to leave behind a mark on this earth and one of them was the renowned polymath, Leonardo Da Vinci. Da Vinci has teased our imagination through his many influential works. His drawing of the Vitruvian Man, which is a cultural icon, has been reproduced everywhere, even on 1 euro coins. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that Da Vinci envisioned the Vitruvian Man as a part of the cosmography of the microcosm. Our iGEM team envisages the Vitruvian Man as the blueprint of our microbiome, the symbiosis with our microbial microcosm. With the rise of genetic engineering, doors to both understanding the past and predicting the future have been opened. Synthetic biology, like every new technology that pushes the boundary of the unknown, has ushered in a sense of precaution. The field is constantly questioning scientists, ligislators, artists and philosophers as we experienced during the Science Café evening. There is a common misconception that microbes only cause deadly diseases and are not in harmony with our body. On the contrary, we carry more microbial cells than human cells in our body. National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimate that 90% of our body is made of non-human cells. The human gut alone contains approximately 40,000 bacterial species, 9 million unique bacterial genes and 100 trillion microbial cells. The skin is home to a virtual zoo of bacteria, says Professor Martin Blaser, Professor of Microbiology, New York University School of Medicine. We are a microbiome, a concept not obvious to most people. Our aim is to depict a snapshot of the microbes present “on the human body” through the cultural icon, Vitruvian Man. We plan to do this in two ways. Firstly by inoculating a human-sized plate and culturing the microbes. The inoculation will be done by making an impression of a human subject, who will be spread-eagled in a Vitruvian Man pose, on a life-sized Petri dish. Besides the human-sized Vitruvian man print, smaller versions of the above are proposed to be made on regular plates by inoculation via a metal Vitruvian Man stamps, and can be handed out. On the smaller plates we will use these stamps that are inoculated by taking swabs from various regions on the body. Using coloured, chromoprotein expressind microbes the shape of the Vitruvian man would be optimally illustrated. We believe that addressing ‘culture’ in the broadest sense, using a cultural icon in a culturable way, will make people rethink the importance of bacteria on our everyday lives, and will in particular increase their awareness of the close interaction we have with our microbiome.

Strategy

In order to create the human-size Vitruvian man plate we had to think of ways to make a huge amount of cheap agar, to create a human-sized plate, to work in a sterile fashion and to find a work place where these goals could be achieved. For the smaller Vitruvian man plates we merely needed to create a suitable stamp and to make optimal use of the bacteria expressing the chromoprotein encoding genes we worked on as part of the larger toolbox.

Approach

The Vitruvian man idea came up during a period in which we were looking for ways to collaborate with a less well-known fraction of the synthetic biology community: biohackers. We found a young biohacker group in Amsterdam at De Waag, a collaborative effort biohackers and artists. We managed to get into contact with them and registered for a couple of biohacker workshops in Amsterdam. At these workshops, given by a Canadian Professor in Bioart, we learned to make our own potato-based agar, thereby solving one of our human-sized Vitruvian man plate obstacles.

First biohacker workshop: Making potato-based agar

Besides that we went through the city, taking swaps of different spots, which would then be cultured on our home-made agar. It was nice that the De Waag community, like us through our Vitruvian man project, were also working on creating awareness of the ‘common man’ for the microbiome around us and synthetic biology. This was also again shown during Science Café where Pieter van Boheemen spoke on behalve of biohacking. Even though we currently have not made the human-sized Vitruvian man, we will still pursue a collaboration with the De Waag community, even when this will not be finalized within the wiki-freeze deadline. The current plan is to make the human-sized plate at their workshop, fill it with a lot of home-made agar and have a student immortalize himself by creating the Vitruvian man imprint. In order to create the small Vitruvian man plates we merely made a swap of a body part, used an aluminium stamp to spread it on the agar plate and created contrast by inoculating coloured bacteria around the edges of the Vitruvian man imprint. (FOTO)

Conclusion

We view this Vitruvian man project as the creative outlet of our Human Practices part. The large and small Vitruvian man plates will, when finished, possibly be showcased at the De Waag building in Amsterdam. This would fulfill our goal of increasing public awareness of the close interaction between humans and their microbiome. Hopefully it will also show the iGEM community that even though we are working in different teams on the future of synthetic biology, it is still very important to discover the many different groups and topics linked to synthetic biology from the present as well as the past.