My bioreactor has a yeast infection

and leak, we must

Succour, 2023 © WhiteFeather Hunter. Multi-chamber glass bioreactor containing live menstrual stem cells from the artist. Glass commissioned from Emma Lashmar. Displayed as part of the MATTER OF FLUX exhibition at Art Laboratory Berlin, curated by Regine Rapp, Christian de Lutz and Tuçe Erecel. Photo: Tim Deussen.

My bioreactor (in the image above) has a yeast infection. It’s most likely not the kind you’re thinking of, though. Rather than the infamous Candida albicans infection of human (vaginal and overall systemic) environments, it appears moreso to be a common yeast infection type, which has occurred before in my kombucha brews: that of Kahm yeast.¹ Kahm is an ambient yeast that appears in liquid cultures (such as a kombucha SCOBY) when the temperature is high—around 40˚C—and there is slight acidity. I refer to it as an infection because it is technically an ‘invasion’ of the otherwise aseptic and closed-loop system that comprises the cyborg body of my bioreactor. My nutrient media is kept in a flask on a heating pad at 40˚C inside the plinth that the bioreactor sits on top of—this is in order to maintain the required body temperature of the fluid as it pumps up through the tubing, from vessel to vessel. I have estimated that that the fluid journey from the flask through the tubing allows enough cooling to lower it to 37˚C by the time it reaches the first vessel. On its journey, the liquid media will continue to cool until it reaches the return destination of the flask on the heating pad once more, and gets warmed again. It’s likely the yeast growth began in the flask on the heating pad and circulated from there.