Good collaboration takes time

 

Munsell color system for bacterial colorants from Venil, Dufosse and Devi (2020) that inspired our work

After publishing our lab note describing our approach to safely isolating and identifying potential microbes for our palette we began to work on a more detailed protocol to follow at the bench. We also began to reach out to our contacts seeking a BSL2 space in which we could perform some of these isolations.

While we’ve completed work on our detailed isolation protocol, our search for a lab space to do it in has hit some road blocks.

Accessing scientific infrastructure from outside academic or industrial scenarios is not always easy. This is why community biology labs (De lange, dunn, and peek (2022) exist, but often they do not have the capacity to work with unknown microbes in BSL2 conditions. Our project aims to find BSL1 organisms from the environment but the initial isolation should happen in a BSL2 environment to account for the potential pathogens that we could isolate from environmental samples.

Today we’ve adjusted the milestone dates of our Experiment.com project to account for the extra time it's taken to find a BSL2 space to conduct our isolations in. We have some environmental samples for the San Francisco palette and a plan to isolate them in the beginning of November, and we'll keep working on securing an additional BSL2 space for a New York palette. In order to keep the project on track, our milestones now reflect our goal of delivering our workshop in the first quarter of 2025.

Thanks for following along with our journey. We’ve been preparing some lab notes about our sampling process, workshop preparation, and the cultural significance of microbes,  and we look forward to sharing those with you in the coming weeks.