Bacteriophage earrings

I intended to make Bacteriophage earrings made from Amethyst quartz and glass seed beads. Initially, I had intended to make pink and violet earrings representative of Gram staining, but came across the Amethyst bead that reminded me of the icosahedral head bacteriophages have. I couldn’t quite capture it in the picture, but the Amethyst has some white string-like dimensions to it, which I used as an interpretation for the phage “DNA” housed in the phage head. The clear crystal bead is representative of the tail, and the gold bead representative of the tail pins. The black beads at the base of the tail fibers weren’t mean to represent any phage anatomy, but instead meant to give the fibers a more phage-like structure.

The tail fibers recognize and interact with the lipopolysaccharide of the host cell wall, a lysozyme is released to weaken the cell wall, the tail fibers pull the tail pins to the host cell wall, then the tail contracts and pushes the the tail through the cell envelope. From here phage “DNA” and proteins are injected into host cell.