Rock, Paper, Scissors - When microbes play games
Rock, Paper, Scissors – When microbes play games was a graphic novel telling the toils and hardships of a cunning little virus triumphing over its enemies with the help of a valiant knight. It illustrated the intense struggles between viruses of bacteria and their bacterial hosts. The graphic novel was developed under an intense collaboration between Orlando Serpe (3rd year Fine Art BA, Falmouth University) and Mariann Landsberger (postdoctoral researcher, University of Exeter).
The development of this book was funded and supported by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, as well as the Genetics Society and the Environment and Sustainability Institute Creative Exchange Programme.
The Creative Practitioner
Orlando's practice focuses around narratives/story telling through visual language, making the story easy to read without words, whilst at the same time including a variety of different mediums, from digital art to printmaking and sculpture. Orlando is interested in the different view points of a subject in the same piece, as if a camera is walking around the subject and taking pictures. You can find more on Orlando's Instragram: andreio_as-art
The Researcher
Mariann is a postdoctoral researcher for the University of Exeter based in the ESI. She is an immunologist with a keen interest in virus-host interactions. Currently, Mariann is focused on different aspects of bacteriophages carrying anti-CRISPR genes, which facilitate the infection of bacteria using the CRISPR-Cas system to defend against phages.