Amino Labs Yeast Canvas Kit™: Create living paintings

Create beautiful living paintings with colorful yeast.

• Make your own 'painting canvases', called agar Petri dishes; an important skill in the life sciences
• Great for science class, visual arts class, or as a fun and easy science and art exercise at home

The Yeast Canvas Kit is a fun first step into learning about biotechnology, microbiology, genetic engineering, and an exciting new branch of art called bioart or agar art. That's right! With this agar art kit, you can make art with yeast!

This 3×30 minutes beginner-friendly activity will teach you or your students how to make and pour agar petri dishes, streak yeast, incubate it, and re-streak it to create unique art pieces.

Just like the original bacteria Canvas Kit, the Yeast Canvas Kit enables you to grow colored yeast to make art, all the while learning about this new organism. If you have done the bacteria Canvas Kit before, key differences you’ll discover firsthand include the incubation temperature and timing, texture and smell of the yeast, and its growth media. As the yeast grows slower than bacteria (36 to 72+ hours of incubation ), this kit can take up to a week to complete.

The recommended equipment for this experiment is a 30 °C incubator. The incubator is recommended for the best result but is not required since the bacteria will grow at room temperature. This does take longer, and produces colors that are more pastel than bright, but works all the same. This kit is compatible with the DNA Playground's built-in incubator and our Classroom Incubator.