Expanding BioArtBot Color Palette - A Beginner's Guide to Lab Automation & Biosafety

The talk introduces BioArtBot, a web-driven art project in which users submit pixel art and an open-source OT2 pipetting robot deposits colored bacteria onto agar. The speaker, a microbiologist who helps run a volunteer community biology lab in New York City, presents it as an entry point into lab automation and synthetic biology, and contrasts it with the scarcity of beginner-friendly biology platforms compared with electronics kits.

The middle of the talk covers the work of expanding the color palette. Rather than relying only on engineered strains, the team sourced natural pigments in two ways: isolating a mold found in home compost, and requesting environmental organisms, such as microbes from solar panels, that were described in published papers. Identification used commercial protein and DNA services, and DNA matching succeeded where the protein method did not. Practical problems included a colony that spread across the whole plate instead of forming single pixels, which was addressed by changing the growth medium. Unidentified organisms were handled under biosafety cabinets until their risk group was known.

The closing section argues that organisms should be identified and assigned a risk group before they are shared or grown in open spaces. The speaker points to the codebase as a framework for contributors, for example by adding new brush styles or sourcing new pigments. Audience questions covered running the web app locally, how long colonies last, and whether a still air box could replace a fume hood.