Creation Protocol

Cells and The City was created in association with Dr Nicolas Minc, team leader at CNRS.

http://www.ijm.fr/recherche/equipes/organisation-spatiale-cellule/

https://sites.google.com/site/nicolasminc/

The project was born from their common will to involve highly advanced techniques from scientific research into the process of creating an empiricist contemporary art film.

Several scientific protocols have then been involved in the production of the images showing growing cells. Particularly, one of these protocols relies on the use of GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) which is a fluorescent protein naturally synthesized by a jellyfish. When the gene encoding for GFP is fused with the gene of another protein, for example a protein B, in the DNA of a cell (a bacteria, yeast or a human cell for instance), then the cell synthesizes a fused fluorescent protein. With this approach, it is then possible to directly observe – and film – this fused fluorescent protein under a microscope to study the protein B within the cell environment.

It is worth noting here that Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien were awarded the nobel prize in chemistry in 2008 for having first discovered and developed the use of GFP.

Nicolas Minc and his team use this method to study how cells grow, define their shapes or divide at a specific location. He works in part with a rod-shape yeast, called fission yeast, which is a unicellular fungus. Using GFP, he targets proteins that are found in the membranes of the cell and in the nucleus.

Yeast is the system that has been chosen for Cells and The City. In the film, the red color shown by cells comes from fused proteins located at the cell tips in the membrane, and the green color comes from proteins located at the surface of the cell nucleus.

Like any population of cells, a population of yeast cells grows by cell division as we can see in the following movie: