Anna Dumitriu (born 1969) is a pioneering visual artist based in Brighton, England, specialising in BioArt. Her installations, interventions and performances use digital, biological and traditional media including bacteria, digital technology and craft techniques, working with diverse audiences.[2]
Plague Dress by Anna Dumitriu, on display at the Thackray Museum of Medicine
Recent artwork focusses on synthetic biology, antibiotic resistance, and sequencing of bacterial DNA. She created "Make Do and Mend" in 2017 which uses the CRISPR gene editing technique of homologous recombination to edit the genome of E. coli bacteria to remove an antibiotic resistance gene and replace it with the phrase "Make Do and Mend" written into its DNA. The CRISPR Journal described the project as "perhaps the first application of CRISPR gene editing technology in BioArt" and continued "To date, the pioneer in using CRISPR technology for Bio-Art is Anna Dumitriu, a well known British bio-artist. Dumitriu conceived, developed, and exhibited for the first time in 2017 an artwork based on the use of CRISPR at the LifeSpace Gallery for science and art research (Dundee, United Kingdom) as part of the Future Emerging Art and Technology exhibition."[4]
In 2024, the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds hosted a solo exhibition of Dumitriu's work, Fragile Microbiomes, including existing pieces and brand new works.[5]
In January 2014, Dumitriu told The Guardian: "Art, for me, is a way of investigating the world. In that way, I see no real distinction between art and science at all."[6]
An antibiotic is a type of antimicrobial substance active against bacteria. It is the most important type of antibacterial agent for fighting bacterial infections, and antibiotic medications are widely used in the treatment and prevention of such infections. They may either kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria. A limited number of antibiotics also possess antiprotozoal activity. Antibiotics are not effective against viruses such as the ones which cause the common cold or influenza. Drugs which inhibit growth of viruses are termed antiviral drugs or antivirals. Antibiotics are also not effective against fungi. Drugs which inhibit growth of fungi are called antifungal drugs.
Antimicrobial resistance occurs when microbes evolve mechanisms that protect them from antimicrobials, which are drugs used to treat infections. This resistance affects all classes of microbes, including bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and fungi. Together, these adaptations fall under the AMR umbrella, posing significant challenges to healthcare worldwide. Misuse and improper management of antimicrobials are primary drivers of this resistance, though it can also occur naturally through genetic mutations and the spread of resistant genes.
The Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, is a museum of the history of medicine adjacent to St James's University Hospital. It opened in March 1997 as the Thackray Medical Museum. In 1998 it won "Museum of the Year" and has other awards including in 2004 both the "Excellence in England Small Tourist Attraction of the Year" and "Sandford Award for Heritage Education".
Antibiotic sensitivity testing or antibiotic susceptibility testing is the measurement of the susceptibility of bacteria to antibiotics. It is used because bacteria may have resistance to some antibiotics. Sensitivity testing results can allow a clinician to change the choice of antibiotics from empiric therapy, which is when an antibiotic is selected based on clinical suspicion about the site of an infection and common causative bacteria, to directed therapy, in which the choice of antibiotic is based on knowledge of the organism and its sensitivities.
Martin J. Blaser is an American physician who is the director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers (NJ) Biomedical and Health Sciences and the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome and Professor of Medicine and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.
Bioart is an art practice where artists work with biology, live tissues, bacteria, living organisms, and life processes. Using scientific processes and practices such as biology and life science practices, microscopy, and biotechnology the artworks are produced in laboratories, galleries, or artists' studios. The scope of bioart is a range considered by some artists to be strictly limited to "living forms", while other artists include art that uses the imagery of contemporary medicine and biological research, or require that it address a controversy or blind spot posed by the very character of the life sciences.
Medical microbiology, the large subset of microbiology that is applied to medicine, is a branch of medical science concerned with the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases. In addition, this field of science studies various clinical applications of microbes for the improvement of health. There are four kinds of microorganisms that cause infectious disease: bacteria, fungi, parasites and viruses, and one type of infectious protein called prion.
The resistome has been used to describe to two similar yet separate concepts:
Hunter Cole is an artist and geneticist. She reinterprets science as art through the creation of living artworks, abstractions, digital art and installations confronting issues related to biotechnology in our culture.
Do-it-yourself biology is a biotechnological social movement in which individuals, communities, and small organizations study biology and life science using the same methods as traditional research institutions. DIY biology is primarily undertaken by individuals with limited research training from academia or corporations, who then mentor and oversee other DIY biologists with little or no formal training. This may be done as a hobby, as a not-for-profit endeavor for community learning and open-science innovation, or for profit, to start a business.
Julian Edmund Davies is a British-born microbiologist and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of British Columbia.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist who has pioneered work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
uBiome, Inc. was a biotechnology company based in San Francisco that developed technology to sequence the human microbiome. Founded in 2012, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2019 following an FBI raid in an investigation over possible insurance fraud involving the US health insurance program Medicare.
Ruth Milne Hall is an Australian microbiologist whose research on mobile genetic elements in bacteria has provided deep insight into the transfer and evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
Jo Zayner is a biohacker, artist, and scientist best known for their self-experimentation and work making hands-on genetic engineering accessible to a lay audience, including CRISPR.
The uterine microbiome refers to the community of commensal, nonpathogenic microorganisms—including bacteria, viruses, and yeasts/fungi—present in a healthy uterus, as well as in the amniotic fluid and endometrium. These microorganisms coexist in a specific environment within the uterus, playing a vital role in maintaining reproductive health. In the past, the uterus was believed to be a sterile environment, free of any microbial life. Recent advancements in microbiological research, particularly the improvement of 16S rRNA gene sequencing techniques, have challenged this long-held belief. These advanced techniques have made it possible to detect bacteria and other microorganisms present in very low numbers. Using this procedure that allows the detection of bacteria that cannot be cultured outside the body, studies of microbiota present in the uterus are expected to increase.
Pharmacomicrobiomics, proposed by Prof. Marco Candela for the ERC-2009-StG project call, and publicly coined for the first time in 2010 by Rizkallah et al., is defined as the effect of microbiome variations on drug disposition, action, and toxicity. Pharmacomicrobiomics is concerned with the interaction between xenobiotics, or foreign compounds, and the gut microbiome. It is estimated that over 100 trillion prokaryotes representing more than 1000 species reside in the gut. Within the gut, microbes help modulate developmental, immunological and nutrition host functions. The aggregate genome of microbes extends the metabolic capabilities of humans, allowing them to capture nutrients from diverse sources. Namely, through the secretion of enzymes that assist in the metabolism of chemicals foreign to the body, modification of liver and intestinal enzymes, and modulation of the expression of human metabolic genes, microbes can significantly impact the ingestion of xenobiotics.
Locus Biosciences is a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company, founded in 2015 and based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Locus develops phage therapies based on CRISPR–Cas3 gene editing technology, as opposed to the more commonly used CRISPR-Cas9, delivered by engineered bacteriophages. The intended therapeutic targets are antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.
Abigail A. Salyers was a microbiologist who pioneered the field of human microbiome research. Her work on the bacterial phylum Bacteroidetes and its ecology led to a better understanding of antibiotic resistance and mobile genetic elements. At a time where the prevailing paradigm was focused on E. coli as a model organism, Salyers emphasized the importance of investigating the breadth of microbial diversity. She was one of the first to conceptualize the human body as a microbial ecosystem. Over the course of her 40-year career, she was presented with numerous awards for teaching and research and an honorary degree from ETH Zurich, and served as president of the American Society for Microbiology.
Amy Karle is an American artist, bioartist, and futurist whose work focuses on the relationship between technology and humanity, specifically how technology and biotechnology impact health, humanity, society, evolution, and the future. Karle combines science and technology with art and is known for using living tissue in her work.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
