Dr Serge Mostowy collaborates on Wellcome Trust Art Award

Silent Signal is a project that brings together six artists and six scientists to create experimental animations for gallery and online exhibition.

Silent Signal, a project that brings together six artists and six scientists to create experimental animations for gallery and online exhibition that will immerse the viewer in the networked worlds of organic communication, is being developed by Animate Projects.

Dr Serge Mostowy, holder of a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship (and Principal Investigator in the MRC Centre for Molecular Bacteriology and Infection) and animated documentary maker Samantha Moore, are one of the six collaborations in the project.

Dr Mostowy's research focuses on developing zebrafish as a new model for the in vivo study of Shigella pathogenesis, septin biology and bacterial autophagy, with the aim to have a more comprehensive understanding of host defence at the molecular, cellular and whole organism level, generating important consequences for bacterial pathophysiology and its control.

Samantha's film project, called 'Loop', will focus on how the cytoskeleton responds to intracellular pathogens by assembling into septin cages within a zebrafish infection model.

When asked whether working with an artist and explaining his research to them affected his approach to, or perception of, his practice, Dr Mostowy replied that ‘for our science to be represented by art helps us to visualise the processes we are studying, and enables common perception to emerge.’

‘The most influential outcome of this project may be the careful depiction of septin assembly (monomer to complex filament to ring to cage). For Samantha to capture the process of septin assembly as it ‘loops’ inside cells and zebrafish is very exciting’.

Further information on the project can be found at http://www.silentsignal.org/about/.