The E. coli long-term evolution experiment, or LTEE for short, is approaching its 30th birthday, which will be on February 24th, 2018.
In honor of all the people who have worked on this project, I thought it would be neat to commission a special, but shareable, piece of art. Given the history of science and my own interest in old books, I decided that a bookplate would be appropriate for that.
So the next challenges were deciding what to depict, and who to make the image. I wondered what a smart, curious, but evolutionarily distant organism—like a cephalopod—would think about the LTEE. Who could make an image both interesting and aesthetically pleasing around that idea?
As Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his book Wonderful Life, the evolution of life—like our own individual lives—is often contingent on chance events. And luckily I stumbled via Twitter on TAOJB—The Art Of Jo Brown—during the “Inktober” one-ink-drawing-each-day-of-October event. You can see Jo’s 31 compositions from 2017 here. Looking at her website, I also discovered that she made wonderful images of cephalopods! So I wrote Jo and commissioned a work to celebrate the LTEE’s upcoming birthday!
In addition to an image, bookplates often say “from the library” or “ex libris” (Latin for “from the books”) followed by the owner’s name. I also decided that, instead of ex libris, mine would say “ex laboratorium” with my name.
But that presented another problem, because I want to give some of the bookplates to people who might like them with their own names. So I’ve asked Jo to make a second version that says ex libris along with a blank area for the recipient to write his or her name.
After Jo’s art is complete, I’ll have a printer use her drawings to make bookplates. I’ll give a few to anyone who has ever done an LTEE transfer and/or coauthored a paper based on the LTEE with me! Please let me know if you read this and are one of those folks.
I’ll also eventually post the images here, but for now you can watch Jo’s twitter feed as she shows her progress on executing the design!
ADDED on Nov. 29: Here are links to Jo’s work in progress including one that shows steps along the way toward the first version and time-lapse videos of her drawing the second version. And the final one shows the two versions completed! Wow & wow!!
Telliamed Revisited 
It goes without saying that I would like one. Squids and E. coli are like my two favorite organisms.
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