Unexplainable Podcast - Amazing Extremophiles
Elizabeth also has an idea that she's been pursuing that comes out of her work as an artist. So in the lab, a lot of her work with these microbes involves grinding them up or freezing them or studying them for very specific reasons, right? But in her artistic practice, she wound up doing something sort of totally different. She and her collaborators put hundreds of gallons of Gowanus water in, in tanks and just let it be.
As she watched the water in the tanks, Elizabeth saw biofilms forming. So these are layered films that connect a bunch of microbes all together in an organized way. This got Elizabeth thinking. Because the molecules in something like coal tar can be really complex. So she thought it might require a bunch of steps— each involving different proteins– to actually break those molecules down. But what if... the microbes weren’t doing that alone?
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