Microbial Muse: Drawing on Microbes for Inspiration: Through music, graphic design, poetry, photography, and metabolic alchemy, microbiology elicits distinctive artistic creativity

Visit systems biologist Peter Larsen at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and you can expect to find a pile of CDs on his desk and a Pandora station tuned to the masters of improvisation. You might recognize John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, or Miles Davis, or it could be less familiar offerings such as coccolithophores and nitrogen. Larsen looks for relationships between microbial populations and their environment.