How I made a picture of Shrek out of living fluorescent bacteria

Added: 2026-05-04

[00:00:00]Here's how I made this picture of Shrek out of living fluorescent bacteria.

[00:00:03]Cloud Labs are making it possible to order biotech experiments from your computer and GKO's cloud lab offers fluorescent pixel art generation as one of their protocols. I found a good picture of Shrek on a transparent background and uploaded him to the website. Once uploaded, my image gets converted into a 32x 48 grid of pixels in six fluorescent shades. Those shades are made by engineered variants of green fluorescent protein from jellyfish including superfolder GFP for the green, venus for yellow, mt turquoise 2 and azurite for blue. The genes encoding these proteins are engineered into different strains of ecoli. And when you shine the right frequency of light on these new bacteria, they'll flues in their specific color. A plate holding the different strains of fluorescent ecoli in a blank agger plate are loaded into a lab site echo acoustic liquid handler which uses ultrasound to vibrate the liquid holding the bacteria and shoot 2.5 nanol droplets up onto the agar. The agger plate is then stored in an incubator at 37° C overnight allowing the cells from the droplets to attach and grow into these little bumps. After that the plate is photographed and that's it. Bioshrek really inspired my friend Jake, who wanted to experiment with ways for people to make more bio art together. Over at cheap.americanwetwear.com, you can buy pixels as part of a collaborative art project. Choose your color and the pixels you want to activate and check out. On May 4th, we'll print whatever is on the plate.

[00:01:38]Will it be another Shrek? Let's find out.