Worm pop art by James T. Wong. 2007.

In 1997, Ahna Skop approached her graduate advisor, John G. White, about adding a worm-themed art show to the International C. elegans Conference he was organizing that year. “He said I could do whatever I wanted, but not to involve him,” she recalls. That year marked the very first Worm Art Show, which has since become a beloved part of the annual meeting. This year, the worm community will celebrate the show’s 20th anniversary at the 21st International C. elegans Conference at UCLA June 21-25th.  

“Vulva monologues” by David Welchman. 2003.

For Skop, who was raised in a household of artists, uniting art and science came naturally. She first started studying C. elegans as an undergraduate, and remembers being struck by the beauty of microscope images in textbooks, even though she didn’t yet understand the science. The rest of the C. elegans research community responded enthusiastically to her inspired idea. The first show was small, but popular. Skop recalls that first show included a blown glass vase with the C. elegans genome sandblasted on the side and a driftwood mobile depicting the larval developmental stages. Even John White submitted a piece, a wooden reconstruction of the C. elegans vulva.

“Brisk swimmers” by Katherine Walstrom. 2011.

C. elegans art by Ahna Skop and Tri Nguyen. 1997.

These first submissions were pre-existing artistic works, and their creators were excited to finally have a place to share them. “People forget that science is a creative vocation,” Skop says. “Scientists are very creative in how they design their experiments, and it also comes out in their hobbies.” The data itself can also be quite beautiful; brilliantly colorful microscope images have been a staple of the art show since the beginning. Skop notes that microscopy is inherently a visually stimulating endeavor, a perfect example of the connection between science and art.

“On the shoulders of Lord Brenner” by Regina Lai. 2015.

The Worm Art Show has grown in size and popularity over the years, but the entries continue to be as varied as the researchers who attend the annual conference. C. elegans has now been interpreted in every media from embroidery to stained glass. According to Skop, the biggest change over the past 20 years has been the growing number of multimedia entries. Cell phone cameras and

“Life cycle on a thread”, a second place winner by Melissa Kelley. 2015.

YouTube have made audio-visual creation more accessible and popular than ever. The Art Show has also acquired yearly themes–the celebration of Nobel Prize winners, for example, or this year’s “C. elegans for social justice.” But through it all, the Art Show has remained a fun celebration of the worm community. Prize winners are selected by popular vote, and the video entries are screened on the last night of the conference, with the winner decided by who gets the most applause.

A painting by Adam Werts featuring C. elegans. 2007.

Skop, now an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has organized every Worm Art Show for the past 20 years. Though the full show is enjoyed only by conference attendees, she says the created works are a powerful way to reach out to non-scientists. “It’s a testament to what science is all about, and I want the public to actually know that,” she says. “This is an easy way to share the beauty of science and shows that scientists are creative people–not just old white men in lab coats.” As a faculty affiliate in the Arts Institute at UW-Madison, Skop can now train art

“C. elegans and C. briggsae” by Todd Harris. 2008.

students in her lab and has helped install large scientific art pieces in the UW-Madison genetics building celebrating fruit flies, mice, yeast, E. coli, and zebrafish, along with C. elegans. She would love to open a scientific art gallery someday where the innate beauty of science can speak to everyone.

GSA-Art features the creative works of scientists, particularly geneticists. Read more about the series from GSA President Stan Fields. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line.

Douglas Bishop is a professor in the Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology and the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago.

Summer shadows, Craigville, MA

Long Beach, Craigville, MA

Guest post by Irene Yan. GSA-Art features the creative works of scientists, particularly geneticists. Read more about the series from GSA President Stan Fields. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line.

My family is very into comics and cartoons. My mother introduced us to MAD magazine, New Yorker cartoons and my father supplied us with a steady stream of Donald Duck and Doraemon comics. Nowadays we have great Science-friendly comics such as PhD comics and Far Side. Comics and cartoons not only are fun but often also present a fresh point of view. As such, they are a good reminder of what drove most of us into science in the first place. The additional advantage about drawing cartoons is that boring meetings and seminars suddenly become an interesting source of inspiration. But—a word of warning—doodling intensely during small committee meetings is frowned upon. Snorting and chuckling while you do it is definitely a no-no. 

About the author: Irene Yan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of São Paulo.

Guest post by Minou Nowrousian. GSA-Art features the creative works of scientists, particularly geneticists. Read more about the series from GSA President Stan Fields. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line.

I work at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and the main topics of my work are genetics and genomics of fungal development. Apart from being a biologist, I’m a photographer, and among my favorite subjects are (former) industrial sites and the changes brought about by the rise and fall of different types of industry in the Ruhr area in Germany.

The area of former steel factory “Phoenix Ost” was turned into an artificial lake surrounded by office and apartment buildings. A former converter (a device to make steel from iron), shown in front of the new buildings, was placed on the lake shore as a monument.

This is still one of the most heavily industrialized and populated areas in Europe, but the two main types of industry that dominated the area until the 1960s, coal and steel, have been on a downward slide for decades. In the wake of this, the region has undergone major structural changes, leading to high unemployment rates and social problems, but also to the re-use of former industrial sites that changed most city landscapes beyond recognition. Today, the area is on course to being a knowledge- and high tech-based economy. Even though we are not quite there yet in some respects, one successful example is the Ruhr-University Bochum, which was the first university to be founded in this area about 50 years ago. Together with several friends, I’ve been taking pictures of industrial sites for many years, trying to document the changes that this area is constantly undergoing.

The former coal mine “Ost” in Hamm was closed in 2010. This year, the area was opened for visitors for a day, with guided tours by former miners. Shown is the changing room with wire baskets instead of lockers that were hoisted to the ceiling to save space.

The former coal mine and coking plant “Zollverein” in Essen is now a museum and was named a UNESCO world heritage site in 2001. The picture shows a detail of the coking plant.

On top of a former mining waste dump, a sculpture called “horizon observatory” was erected in 2008.

The car manufacturer Opel (subsidiary of General Motors) had a factory in Bochum from 1962 to 2015. The factory buildings are currently demolished to use the space for new developments that are expected to bring employment opportunities to the region.

Sunrise over the city of Bochum, in the foreground the winding tower of the former mine “Holland” (all mines were named, e.g. after people, places, organizations).

New office tower that was built in 2013 on a former World War II bunker.

The former coking plant “Hansa” in Dortmund is now a museum. Parts of the large area are reclaimed by nature.

The machine hall of the former coal mine “Zollern” in Dortmund is an example of the beginning of modern industrial architecture, combining historism, art nouveau, and modern elements.

Guest post by Daniel Friedman. GSA-art features the creative works of scientists, particularly geneticists. Read more about the series from GSA President Stan Fields. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line.

Inspirations

The world around us is flush with patterns. My favorite way to analyze these patterns in the daytime is the scientific method, and at nighttime I prefer art. Scientific rigor lends itself well to the clarity and exactness of daytime. But at night the darkness descends, the ambiguities proliferate, and less-than-logical artistic pursuits reign supreme. In the daytime-mindset, each pixel of a drawing is defined, meaningless, static; objectively either black or white. Yet in the nighttime-mindset, the experience of viewing a drawing is imbued with rhythm and softness, with movement and subjectivity.  In art as in life, I think that “meaning” enters into the whole picture, at the level of the whole picture. This holistic perspective is often banished from our teaching and research, at an incalculable cost to society. More drawings can be found here. And remember: Live. Laugh. Mitose.

The Reactive Genome.  https://www.flickr.com/photos/daniel_friedman/25036466751

Research

How do ant colonies behave adaptively at the collective level, when each individual worker acts without knowledge of global conditions? With Professor Deborah Gordon at Stanford University, I am researching how colonies of the red harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) regulate foraging behavior. To do this, I quantify patterns of gene expression, carry out behavioral experiments in the field, and perform neurochemical analysis of ant brains. I want to understand how individual-level neurophysiological variation is related to patterns of inter-colony behavioral variation. Directly, this work addresses the role of natural variation in individual gene expression for multilevel eco-evolutionary systems. Indirectly this work has implications for the understanding, design, and control of distributed systems such as transportation networks, the internet, and the brain.

Recombination. https://www.flickr.com/photos/daniel_friedman/14169607682/stats/

Central Dogma Part-Dieu. https://www.flickr.com/photos/daniel_friedman/20091245320

De-Central Dogma. https://www.flickr.com/photos/daniel_friedman/30395377544/

About the author: Daniel Friedman is a graduate student in Biology at Stanford University.

Guest post by Vijay Ramani. GSA-art features the creative works of scientists, particularly geneticists. Read more about the series from GSA President Stan Fields. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line.

I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember! My parents started me with South Indian classical (carnatic) singing when I was three or so, and in middle school I began transitioning towards “Western” classical voice, first as a boy soprano and eventually as a classical tenor. Through middle and high school I took part in various honors choirs, an activity I continued as an undergraduate at Princeton, where I was part of a couple of classical choirs, as well as an all-male a cappella group, the Princeton Nassoons. As a Nassoon, I got a chance to sing in all sorts of venues (from concert halls to muddy farms), a few of which can be seen in the following YouTube videos. Though I’m singing a fair bit less now (as a 4th year graduate student in Jay Shendure’s lab at the University of Washington), I still get a chance to perform occasionally with the Seattle Symphony Chorale, a volunteer choir in Seattle that provides the chorus for our city’s symphony orchestra!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0pTYOZLVpIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmbpRGC9mD0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VODoZfFZhqA

Editor’s note: Vijay’s voice may sound familiar to those who follow GSA President Stan Fields’ frameshifts posts. Vijay sang the Gilbert and Sullivan parody “The very model of a classical geneticist.”

Guest post by Ahna Skop. GSA-art features the creative works of scientists, particularly geneticists. Read more about the series from GSA President Stan Fields. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line.

I love Caenorhabditis elegans first for its beauty and then for the science. Beauty inspires my curiosity to figure out how things work and is most likely why I ended up a cell biologist. I dream about C. elegans and mitosis all the time. I am always inspired by things people can’t see with the naked eye. I think nature is miraculous in design, texture, and beauty, even on the microscopic level. I especially love the textures I see from electron microscopic images and have often used them in my ceramic art pieces. But I take inspiration from other biological organisms and my colleagues often as well.

Genetically I’m an artist. My father, Michael Skop, was a bit of a Renaissance man and was a classically trained fine artist who studied with Mestrovic (a pupil of Rodin) and also taught college-level anatomy. Actually, his middle name was Roe. Yes, that’s Mike Roe Skop. His high school biology teacher said his middle name should be Roe, so he got it legally changed (he didn’t originally have a middle name). His signature on his artwork included a small microscope. He operated an art school at our home studio for over 30 years, attracting artists, musicians, and philosophers from all over the world. My mother was a high school art educator and ceramicist and has dabbled in fiber art, sculpture, and painting. My two sisters and brother are also graphic artists.

Growing up, I was surrounded by clay, paint, charcoal, wood, and we were always trying new things and meeting other artists and students doing a variety of amazing pieces. We didn’t have any boundaries and I certainly didn’t set any for myself as I got older. I attribute this to my parents nurturing my creativity. I think of myself as a big kid, always learning, discovering, and trying new things.

I do just about everything, from graphic design, watercolor, ceramics, cakes, food blogging, and web design, to jewelry. If there is something I don’t know how to use or do, I usually take a class. My creative outlets are constantly changing which keeps me always learning and thinking. As well as creating my own, I have curated exhibitions of scientific art (TINY: Art from microscopes and the Cool Science Image Exhibition for the Macpherson Eye Research Institute). I am also an affiliate with the UW-Madison Arts Institute where I am able to mentor artists in my lab. You can see some videos of the art installed on our floor here.

Logo for the 2005 C. elegans Meeting.

My hobbies influence my research and teaching immensely, as they allow me to see things in different ways. During my undergrad studies, my development textbook showed the first confocal image of the mitotic spindle in a one-cell C. elegans embryo. This was taken by Tony Hyman on the very first confocal microscope that my future graduate mentor, John White, invented. I was smitten with the beauty of mitosis that day. I even circled the image and said I love this. By a twist of fate, John White moved to UW-Madison and I had the honor of working in his lab. And guess what I still work on? Mitosis and C. elegans embryos!

Installation of scientific art I did in our department’s foyer.

For this post, I am sharing a watercolor and three C. elegans meeting logos I created over the years. When I was a graduate student, my advisor, John White, asked me to make a logo for the 1997 International C. elegans Meeting, and the yin-yang logo is what I came up with. I’ve been doing the meeting logos almost every year since then. I have also organized the bi-annual Worm Art Show for the Meeting since I was a graduate student.

I find logo design a rewarding and challenging part of my contribution to the awesome C. elegans community. It’s fun to think about what attendees will want to wear on t-shirts and abstract books; why be boring? The greatest thing is that there is a cohort of scientists who now collect my designs on t-shirts and they come to the meetings with a pair of shorts and an “Ahna Skop collection” of t-shirts in their luggage and tell me how easy it is to pack for the meeting!

Logo for the 1997 C. elegans Meeting

Logo for the 2011 C. elegans Meeting

About the author: Ahna Skop is an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics and an affiliate faculty in Life Sciences Communication and the UW-Madison Arts Institute at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ahna is also a SACNAS and ASCB Minority Affairs Committee member, where she is passionate about the success of the underrepresented in STEAM fields. Her lab seeks to understand the molecular mechanisms that underlie asymmetric cell division during embryonic development using the nematode C. elegans as a model system.

Guest post by Beata Edyta Mierzwa. GSA-art features the creative works of scientists, particularly geneticists. Read more about the series from GSA President Stan Fields. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line.

I used to draw a lot—mostly portraits of my friends—before starting my studies in molecular biology at the University of Vienna. I went to Switzerland for my Master’s thesis at the ETH Zürich, and recently finished my PhD in Daniel Gerlich’s group at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) in Vienna.

During my PhD, I realized that showing a drawing as part of my scientific presentations sparked interest and tended to stay in people’s memories. This is one of the initial reasons that I began making science-themed art. I have been very lucky to be part of an institute that encourages creativity, with yearly Art & Science contests and many other opportunities to present my art. I recently had the great honor to have my drawing selected for the cover and abstract book of the Cell Cycle Meeting in Cold Spring Harbor, and I was overwhelmed by the positive feedback I received. It was an incredibly rewarding experience that encouraged me to start creating art work for other people’s research as well as my own. You can find a complete gallery on my website (www.beatascienceart.com).

When devotion begets emotion – the life of a PhD student. These portraits of my fellow PhD students illustrate the intense emotions researchers face in everyday life in the lab. These drawings were part of a contribution to the Art & Science contest at the Vienna Biocenter, for which my team received the first prize in 2013.

Inspirations

I have always loved art, and have always loved science. I realized that combining these passions creates a unique way to communicate science.

With my illustrations, I highlight fundamental scientific aspects in an unconventional and memorable way. I want to add some creativity to the conventional forms of scientific communication, with the aim to spark interest inside and outside the scientific community. Every drawing is an experiment!

To separate our DNA during cell division, the mitotic spindle pulls the duplicated chromosomes towards opposite poles of the cell. This hand-drawn illustration shows how chromosomes align in the equator of the cell during metaphase before they are separated into each of the two daughter cells.

The angle of the mitotic spindle during cell division affects the decision-making of differentiation and thus ultimate position within the brain. This illustration was recently selected as the cover for an issue of EMBO Journal, accompanying a paper I was involved in during my Master’s thesis.

Research

I work on cytokinetic abscission, the final step in cell division that separates the emerging daughter cells. Abscission is mediated by a machinery composed of the Endosomal Sorting Complex Required for Transport (ESCRT)-III. ESCRT-III is thought to form polymers that constrict the intercellular bridge until the membranes split. ESCRT‐III mediates membrane deformation and fission not only during cytokinesis, but also in various fundamental cellular processes, including multivesicular body formation, virus budding, plasma membrane repair, and nuclear envelope sealing. Current models propose that persistent filaments drive membrane constriction. However, whether ESCRT-III polymers exchange their subunits with soluble cytoplasmic pools—like other force-generating filament systems such as actin and tubulin—is not known.

My research project focuses on investigating the dynamics of this fascinating machinery, with the aim to shed light on how ESCRT-III polymers reorganize to drive membrane constriction and fission in a large diversity of cellular processes.

To illustrate how ESCRT-III splits the intercellular bridge during abscission, I created an “ESCRT” dress. This was a contribution to the Art & Science contest for the institutes at the Vienna Biocenter.

Check out my website (www.beatascienceart.com) for recent updates and a complete gallery.

All images © 2016 Beata Edyta Mierzwa

Guest post by Shruthi Vembar. GSA-Art features the creative works of scientists. Read more in GSA President Stan Fields’ call for submissions. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email to GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line.

Madhubani painting, also known as Mithila painting, is an art form that originated in Northern India, in the border between Nepal and the state of Bihar. Not much is known about the lineage of this centuries-old art tradition except that it was a domestic ritual practiced by women, for example on the walls of their homes, and was highly individualized. Although commercialization led to the over-simplification and repetition of select themes, contemporary Madhubani painters, especially local artists from Bihar, still remain true to the distinct aesthetics of this art form while incorporating contemporary and socially charged themes such as women’s empowerment and social transformation.

I started Madhubani painting six years ago, when I took a break in Bangalore between my PhD and postdoc. I use handmade paper and drawing ink to paint Madhubani pictures. My first encounter with this art form was when I created “Kalinga mardana”.

“Kalinga Mardana”

The richness of color, design and symbolism had me hooked and I kept going back for more—this resulted in paintings such as “Ardhanaareeshwara”, “Resplendence” and “Of men and birds”. The repetitive, geometric patterns coupled with the construction of a unifying narrative make the process of creating these paintings meditative and highly rewarding. In fact, I find that the creative process I use for painting complements the scientific thinking process and helps me to bring innovation and originality into my research.

“Of men and birds”

I have now painted several Madhubani pictures and given them as gifts to my family and friends on special occasions. For instance, “Woman and pot” and “Vibrant Peacock” were gifts to my friends for their 40th and 30th birthdays, respectively, while “Palanquin bearers” and “Raasleela” were wedding gifts.

In Henri Moore’s words, “The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.” I feel truly grateful for my two great obsessions, Madhubani art and science, and cannot imagine my life without them.

“Patterns”

“Ardhanaareeshwara”

“Resplendence”

“Raasleela”

“Woman and pot”

“Vibrant peacock”

“Peacock”