Proteus Naked

I spent my professional career as a molecular microbiologist exploring a fascinating bacterium that you see in this post: Proteus mirabilis. I’ll spare you the details, but what makes this bug so cool is that it ‘knows’ when it is on a surface or in highly viscous surroundings, and when it senses this, it changes its shape to adapt to the new environment and becomes very long and covered with hundreds of newly formed flagella that propel it over or through the milieu.

I wanted to “dress up” a couple of electron micrographs of this bacterium to retain some science but inject a fair amount of art. The results are shown above.

Do you like them? Are you interested in knowing more about P. mirabilis? Please enter your thoughts (or questions) in the comments (below), and thank you for visiting my blog.