Recent progress:

cat cancer + future collaborations

I had the pleasure of meeting a kindred spirit recently. It doesn't happen all that often, so I was thrilled.

I met her through Kijiji, where she'd posted an antique school table for sale, and I decided to buy it. You never know who you're dealing with when you interact with someone in a buy/sell capacity on a public forum like Kijiji or Craigslist, and I didn't know what to expect when I went to her house to see the table. The neighbourhood seemed a bit sketchy on the surface, other than that fancy Porsche parked across the street from her front door. However, inside her home was a wonder-filled den of curios, resembling but even better than my own collection.

She is also a bone collector, with very old specimens of tiny, mounted antlers, snakeskins, shells and barnacles, and of course bones, bones, bones. She also had a great art collection, most of which was hung gallery-style on one wall facing her staircase. I was enthralled, and she asked me if I'd like to see her collection upstairs.

In the upstairs of her house is a jewelry studio, also filled with an assortment of curios, including a cabinet with the skeleton of her former pet, a Persian cat. She had the vertebrae separated into glass petri dishes, as well as other parts in their own glass containers. The skull was really interesting, since the face was so flat--much different from my cat skull in my collection at home. Things got really exciting, however, when I began talking to her about my work with bone cancer in the lab. She then brought out the jaw bone of her cat, which was bulging with a calcified specimen of osteosarcoma! Here it is, below:

Persian cat osteosarcoma, in the collection of Elaine Ho.

For me, this was the first time seeing a firsthand specimen of a mineralized osteosarcoma tumour--previous to this, I'd only seen it in photographs. Elaine told me that she hadn't known that her cat had jawbone cancer until after its death, when she received the skeleton from the vet. This is osteobiography, the story of a life written in its bones. Osteosarcoma is actually extremely rare in cats, but the jaw is a fairly common place for it to be found (even in humans).

Let me do the official introduction now: My new friend is Elaine Ho, a Montreal jeweler. I looked at some of her work in her studio, mainly cast pieces, which I loved. We made a plan to keep in touch, perhaps for possible future collaborations. She's interested in casting some of my osteosarcoma biotextiles for jewelry, which could be really interesting. Her work is FANTASTIC, just my style, and you can check out her website, here or find her on Facebook, here.

laboratory yeast infections + biohacking

HOW exciting - my U-2 OS culture on woven horsehair has *actually* begun to form smooth, well-adhered, multiple layers of tissue! This means that the cells, instead of hanging out on the fibres by a thin connection, staying rounded in clumps and potentially ready to fall off with any minor disturbance, have fully engaged now with the fibre and will not fall off, but continue to form real tissue. This is a pivotal moment. You can see what I'm talking about:

That's my uber-scientific screen shot of a zoomed-in image of an iPhone photo through the lens of the microscope. The other weaving, which is done just with catgut surgical sutures, has clumps growing on it:

Some of my other cultures, however, didn't fare so well. The silk cloths inoculated with both U-2 OS and SAOS showed signs of a fungal contamination. One of the dishes with contamination was one that I accidentally dipped the tip of my glove in last week - I was hoping I'd be lucky and not see any contamination, but alas. Interestingly, the fungal contaminant is extremely fibrous. I think it's yeast. Still, I euthanized it. Here's what it looked like:

The small, neat broom-like fibres (hyphae) are the fungus while the larger, longer and unruly fibres are the silk.

The second contamination, which I didn't take photos of, appeared to have been a different type of yeast contamination, with globules overtaking the culture completely. From what I've been reading, both contaminations are most likely candida albicans, which in one stage is a mass of hyphae like what we see above (called mycelia), and in another stage is the actual 'yeast' cells (which are pathogenic). So, there we have it: my cultures got a yeast infection and the yeast infection killed the cancer. It's possible the candida came from my own body, either when I was handling the silk barehanded at home in order to clean it before taking it to the lab, or I rubbed against my face or something with my glove while in the lab. Fascinating. Once again, I am (likely) the contaminant. One site explains all this quite well if you're interested in learning more (I am!). Now the question: if candida destroys cancer in vitro, does it do the same in the human body? Is that why we have it naturally present within our bodies in the first place? My friend, Tarsh Bates, whom I met at SymbioticA last year and who was working on her PhD in BioArt, centred all of her research around candida albicans and was doing quite a bit of work with it. I know she was culturing it extensively on agar plates, as well as producing inoculation serum, but I'm not sure if she ever did in culture media as a contaminant or produced mycelium. You can read more about her work, beginning here.

So, I will have to redo the silk cloth experiments and hope no more yeast infections occur.

Can you spot the yeast infection? Look for something round, white and slimy-looking at the top.

Now, another fun thing happened today: a biohacking workshop with an awesome Montreal group of scientists, engineers, bioinformatics researchers and artists that I belong to, called Bricobio. It was a workshop to try to come up with a recipe to make your own culture media. Super interesting. Here are some photos from that workshop:

Jutta and Kevin give an intro to bacteria culture and a worm that eats it, C. elegans.

Some of our kitchen lab equipment and materials for asepsis/sterilization and hacking culture media.

 The recipe my group came up with for making our own culture media was:

• 2 shot glasses of beef broth (protein? sodium)
• 1/3 shot glass of maple syrup (glucose)
• 6 shot glasses dH2O (distilled water to dilute the mixture)
• 1/3 tsp soy flour (protein?)

We mixed that recipe in our sterilized shot glasses and then heated them for 30 minutes in 80˚C water on the stovetop to sterilize the whole media. Then we sterilized a coffee filter in the microwave at 60 seconds and used it to filter the particulate matter out of the media--mainly, the soy flour that didn't dissolve. Then we innoculated the media with saliva to see what bacteria would grow, and placed the glasses of media in a quickly assembled warm water bath, to incubate. I'll have to wait for the results of that because at that point I had to leave the DIY kitchen lab to go to the institutional lab. 

Sterilizing shot glasses in rubbing alcohol, to use as media beakers. True DIY. That's my trusty Tristan behind me.

Chemical engineers and other scientists mixing their own DIY media recipes to test them out.

Note the selective use of lab coats.

Sterilizing our fresh culture media.

Our culture media in the warm water bath after inoculation: one is inoculated with saliva and the other with distilled water to use as a negative control in the testing.

I'll have to follow up with the results of these experiments once I find out what they were, and how well our funky media worked. This, folks, is how a bio nerd spends her Saturdays.

biotext

click image to enlarge

Wordclouds are useful for mixing up ideas and generating new ones. My favourites from this one that I generated: nonhuman tissage, miniature haptic, materia bioethics, feminist ontology, unseen textile, architecture membrane, omniphilic otherbeing, science mistake, scaffold failure, digital praxis, semi-living metaphysical technique... and on an on. I've made numerous wordclouds in different configurations with this same wordset. I'm building on my glossary and ramping up my mental expansion by doing this. Other words that have come up that I like: microscopic text, metaphysical production, haptic commune, slow laboratory, membrane maker, feminist manifest, permeable community, knit word, observation philosophy, interwoven biohazard, string chance, architecture intervention, agency intersections. I can use all of these new iterations of ideas when writing about my work. Best autobrainstorming application ever! You can do it, too, here.

mani-festation/ materialization

manifest/materialize:

mani - manus - hand
                                 we manifest reality by hand/ manipulate material
we embody
a process of creation, through our own external efforts + those of our internal microorganisms
materialize
tissus - tissage = flesh + weaving

These are thought and concept fragments.

Staring into a microscope and watching and waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waaaaaaaiting for otherbeings to do their work in order to complete my work, makes me insane. !

so I wove a thing and manifested a tissu/tissage - the 'act' and the 'thing' are the same word (tissage/ weaving) + tissu translates to both 'cloth' and 'flesh'
Materiality
Digiterial
digits - fingers - digital handmade - jacquard=machine/woman/computer
This hybrid birth by a cyborg artist

The cloth will only actually be birthed off the front roll bar of the loom early next week when the warp is cut and the full length unrolled, but here is the view of the object on the loom during and after I finished weaving, FOR 12 HOURS STRAIGHT. I was in a manic flow and did not disrupt it because when a creative wave hits like that, you ride it to the very end. I was possessed.

The beginning.

I wound and wove about 20+ of these yarn-filled bobbins.

I wove sitting down until my bum wouldn't let me sit anymore on that horrid wooden bench. Then I wove standing up and rocking back and forth with the shuttle shots, for approximately 5 hours. I danced this cloth into being, wearing the devil's shoes, blasting vintage hits and chill dub throughout the industrial room that overlooks the Saint Lawrence river and entire (Montreal) south-facing city scape that lay out 10 floors below. I still cannot comfortably sit down (a health and safety hazard referred to as "weaver's bottom"). It was bliss.

Next I must repair the broken threads post cut-off from the loom.
Repair - mend - it is in our nature to repair, regenerate.
Knot magic.
More here on "white witches who cast knot magic" using horse hair.
More on horse hair in a minute.

The weaving specs, where each thread equals 1 pixel of an image:
1700 pixels wide x 2400 pixels long @ 40 dpi (or threads per inch) - each thread intersection makes a dot in the image... meaning, the weaving is theoretically 42.5" x 60" but I can guarantee it's longer than that due to my 'hand'. Digitally, the dimensions are what they are, but digits/hand variances in my beat, speed, tension (all those things that determine the resultant cloth density) alter those dimensions. My signature weaving style/make are referred to as my 'hand', as is the drape and feel of the cloth post-finishing. Sometimes the digital design has to be altered to account for the hand of the weaver.

The fully woven item, which wraps a number of times around the lower beam seen here. Also note the bench from hell.

The image is constructed of 12 different twill type cloth structures which blend together to render the image, each one of the 12 representing a different shade of grey in the image, meaning I had to reduce the original image down to 12 shades. This reduction is a labourious part of the computer-assisted design process and took about 2 hours to accomplish. Here is the original image (which was around 200 different colours and shades), of connective tissue cell growth on my miniature handwoven collagen surgical sutures:

This image was captured for me by Guy Ben-Ary.

It is meta-material.

There's something else about this weaving. 
There was a threading mistake in the warp, which I had the option to have fixed or to leave as it was. I decided to *not* fix the threading mistake, which existed prior to my taking up the weaving shuttle. This odd thread out is visible in some parts of the cloth, disrupting the wonderful illusion of the image. This intentional leaving-in of a 'mistake' is a nod to the ancient weavers who intentionally wove mistakes into their cloths in order to avoid angering the gods, because they believed that only the gods can create perfection. Other than this found/intended threading mistake, the weaving is perfect. This is also my nod to the notion of meddling in biotechnology as 'playing god' with living forms/ life and the many things that can go wrong.


To conclude, the knot magic and the white horse hair I'm manipulating in the lab:

u-2 os (osteosarcoma) cells on woven horse hair after 1.5 weeks

And the same horse hair weaving with u-2 os after 2 weeks.

Now,

This is crocheted horse hair with a new batch of u-2 os (only a few days old here)

Also,

I did this with silk organza to create miniature cloth scaffolds and enculturated them with both u-2 os and saos cells.

Micrograph of the above image. Only a few days old here, and just a few adhered to the silk fibres. It'll be interesting to see how the cells react to the silk, given the natural indicators contained in silk for healthy bone growth.

Lastly, I want to share some of my observations of the cells in culture. Both U-2 OS and SAOS-2 behave in uncharacteristic ways, cellularly-speaking. They don't simply adhere to a surface and proliferate through mitosis and forming a monolayer. They are in constant rapid mitosis and spitting cells into the suspension media (the liquid they're in), almost like pollination. They spread to other parts of the flask this way, without having to use motility to crawl along and spread. They simply land somewhere else and begin a new colony there. We can see why cancer spreads so quickly in some cases - because it uses both cell motility AND some kind of cellular pollination method.

Another observation: my massively confluent cultures (which I've decided to allow to overgrow the flasks instead of splitting them into new flasks) have begun to form the most interesting channels of cells, like wide branchy root systems almost like lace patterns, or knit bones. I think this is the tumour tissue itself. See below.

u-2 os cell culture allowed to grow past confluency for more than a month.

What I've discovered about the osteosarcomas is that they seem to grow both horizontally and vertically at competing rates - in some cases, especially with the SAOS, they actually grow vertically faster (which is unusual behavior for cells).

In my next post, I'll include some of my new protocols, like for prepping silk for cell culture, etc.