God created the world with multiple faces. And it is only up to us whether we will look at His creation with the eyes of a discoverer, or we will trust the labels that someone has placed before us.

On a Christmas, in a French laboratory, a Christmas tree was shining. And despite the fact it's as big as a petri-dish, its image will go round the world of scientists, and will turn into a symbol. A lot of things happened after that, but it's time to list the most important things - live bacteria, nutrition, petri dish.

“Two years ago I was working in a laboratory in France for my master's degree in microbiology,” Rositsa Tashkova says. “And since it was not in a big team, sometimes I got bored. Perhaps that's why I had secret experimental projects - for entertainment. I was doing them behind my professor's back. Later I started showing my colleagues what I had created, and one of these experiments was to create a Christmass tree of micro-organisms in a petri dish.”

Instead of throwing out stacked petri with colonies of microorganisms of all sorts and colors, Rosica heated a small wire with a handle and started creating. Thus the actinomycetes turn into snowflakes, and the various bacilli - in trunks, fir branches and Christmas toys. Then she puts the creation in a warm environment.

“In order to paint something beautiful on this environment, one should know the properties of microorganisms,” Rossitsa Tashkova explains. “Different types of microorganisms need different environment and different cultivation temperature to grow. In addition, they have different colors linked to their interaction with the environment. Sometimes, however, a species becomes an antagonist to another, suppressing its growth, and in this case it is possible that one of the colors will not appear on the picture at all. But the most interesting thing is that the artist does not actually see what they are doing in the painting process, because initially one can only see pale scratches. The painting literally comes alive over time.”

Rositsa sent a photo of her Christmas tree to the American Society of Microbiology (ASM), and then shared it on her wall in Facebook. The number of likes, shares, and comments reached a huge number for an ASM post, she says. And for the third year, the organization ha been conducting an international competition for microorganism drawings in petri dishes. Bulgarian Science magazine, will soon hold its second contest. This way native scientists want to prove that microbiology is also a form of art.

“One needs in-depth knowledge - purely scientific and practical, and some sense of aesthetics, too,” Rositsa Tashkova says. "It has always seemed to me that microbiologists really have a more peculiar look at the world, as a person usually admires the surrounding nature while microbiologists work with something they do not see. Of course, there are microscopes, but they have limitations and a great deal of the work of microbiologists happens at the level of imagination.”

Everything around us can become art but one should look with unprejudiced eyes. This is what Rositsa did to become the first scientist in the world to draw with microorganisms.

English: Alexander Markov