A recent bioart collaboration is turning out to be one of my juiciest and most fun yet, and will be presented as a project in progress next week at the upcoming Taboo—Transgression—Transcendence in Art & Science conference happening in Valletta, Malta.1 This project morphed out of a 3D bioprinting collaboration that I began last year in Montreal, and has now expanded to include two more lovely collaborators, Jiabao Li at the University of Texas in Austin,2 and Lera Niemackl at The Open Discovery Institute (also headquartered in Austin).3 Jiabao and Lera have collaborated previously on experiments with menstrual cells, and so they were a perfect fit for my ongoing projects. I’m so excited about what we’ve been cooking up together in our respective labs.
The 3D bioprinting project I began in Montreal last year, funded by Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec, has included culturing and characterizing my menstrual cells. They have so far been indicated as menstrual stem cells (MenSCs) through antibody staining and flow cytometry that I did in Montreal and then repeated in Perth. Also while in Montreal, I grew them on top of and inside of 3D bioprinted forms, and got some fabulous fluorescent microscopy of the cells growing in/on the forms. These experimental forms have so far been miniature menstrual cups, bioprinted with a DIY gelatin-alginate that I made, as well as with commercially prepared GelMA (gelatin methlyacryloyl). Now, with Jiabao and Lera, the bioprinting is taking on a new shape, which I’ll talk about in a moment.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Frantic Panties to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.