Microbial Magic

The season of giving will soon be upon us so I thought I this would be a great opportunity to search the web and curate a mini exhibition of the anatomically awesome things that people create! For the first of this series lets start small, with some microbes!

Society6 is one of the sites I joined last year to help promote my work. And through it I have been able to find a variety of fresh yet talented artists:

Microbe 1 by Veronica Martinis

 

Microbe Family by AMOSLIDE

(And I am not quite sure what this is, but I like it too  … )

Microbes are also quite fashionable:

Bacteria – Thousands Of ‘Em (Pink) by Chayground

Histoplasma Capsulatum by Yours Truely 😉 ( Autumn Kulaga )

Retro Amoeba Earrings by LemantulaDesigns

 

Or maybe you know someone that appreciates more tangible objects. You know grown adults searching for “collectables” ( a.k.a desk toys) .

Bacteriophage T7 Model

Shapeways is an amazing site bringing 3D printing and prototyping capability to the masses.

4c9o by Virtox

E-coli Toxin by Anthromod

 

And of course we can’t forget about the more commonly known plush microbes. Cuddly enough for an infant, even the bed bug is adorable!

Bed Bug Plush

 

Alicia Watkins is an Etsy Vendor who will create any one of a variety of microbes by cross stitch:

Microbes cross stitch set by Alicia Watkins

Or perhaps you are crafty enough to try out some of her patterns yourself?!

 

Know of any other microbial wonders? Feel free to share in the comments of this post!

Reverse Transcriptase

I like small things. I like the things that affect us and we can’t see. It amazes me that viruses, bacteria, living and non-living entities which we can barely see can coexist with us, or really ruin our day.

The CGSociety is sponsoring a challenge put on by Autopack, the autoPack Visualization Challenge.
I do plan on submitting an image to the challenge, but I mainly used this as inspiration for my animation this semester. Originally I wanted to depict the entire life cycle of HIV. So I started storyboarding:

After I wrote and drew the steps out I realized this was a lot of information to cover in a 30-60 second animation.  I am still learning animation techniques and to learn all of the techniques in three months would have been pretty ambitious ( especially with project research in the background).  So It was agreed that I should focus on a part of the viral life cycle.

 

At this point I started thinking about HIV, and pondered “what really makes HIV so dangerous?” The answer is in the proteins HIV caries with it. One of these proteins is reverse transcriptase (RT). HIV uses RNA to carry genetic information. In order to infect its host HIV needs proteins like RT to make DNA out of the RNA. The new DNA is later integrated into the host DNA by Integrase (a character for separate HIV tale).

My main character, HIV Reverse Transcriptase, isn’t perfect. A lot of the time it screws up. One may wonder how this messy virus lives so long and infects so many. In fact, the constant mistakes made by RT works to HIV’s advantage. This ever so slightly will modify the envelope proteins, making them unrecognizable to the body’s immune system.

 I need to storyboard again and figure out exactly what will happen throughout the animation. But at least for now, I have my star.

HIV Reverse Transcriptase with RNA/DNA
pdb model 2hmi