Found art: the yeast vacuole

ABSTRACT

Over the past 9 years I have worked with artists who have used various media to portray the process of autophagy. This has included paintings, protein music, a piano composition, a wood sculpture, a quilt, and a dance. Here, I describe a two-part project that focuses on the vacuole/lysosome. In the initial part of the work I assembled the found-art vacuole; the second part involved the work of a professional watercolor artist, who describes his part of the project from a non-scientist’s perspective.

Introduction

To be perfectly honest, part of the motivation behind The Yeast Vacuole was quite simple: In all of my previous projects I provided scientific direction, but nothing in the way of the actual art [1–6]. That approach seemed a little unbalanced, so I tried to think of a medium I could use myself. This goal led to the idea of creating a found-art piece. The idea behind ‘found art’ is that the items being used are not artistic in and of themselves – the art comes from the way they are arranged. For my project, depicting the vacuole seemed like an obvious choice. First, it is an organelle I have studied for many years. Second, the concept of portraying one of the fundamental functions of the vacuole – the degradation of various macromolecules – could be done through the use of common (and some not so common) kitchen implements.

Results and discussion

Part 1: the found art sculpture

The yeast vacuole is analogous to the mammalian lysosome, although it carries out a much more diverse range of functions [7]. Nonetheless, the activity most often associated with this organelle is degradation. Of course, this is not surprising, given the large number of hydrolytic enzymes present in the vacuole, and the fact that one of its principle functions is indeed the breakdown of various macromolecules, including the four primary groups of organic compounds: proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and nucleic acids [8].

Thinking of protein degradation, it immediately became obvious that there would be many options to choose from among kitchen tools that are used for breaking down meat. The challenge here was to be unique or distinctive. That is, a steak knife would be appropriate, but could also be rather dull (that’s a small kitchen pun). In contrast, what about a 4-bladed meat saw (Figure 1)? When was the last time you saw one of those? For that matter, when was the first time? That is what I mean by something unusual. Not that everything had to fit that bill. For example, meat grinders are perhaps not used in homes as commonly as they once were, but they are not what I would call exotic (Figure 2). Of course, no self-respecting ‘vacuole’ would be complete without some standard items such as meat cleavers, but I think more interesting was a ‘compound kitchen tool’ (Figure S1) with a blunt side that can be used to tenderize meat, as well as a reverse cutting side.

Figure 1.

A 4-bladed meat saw, ca 1930s–1940s within the vacuole. The inset shows a side view.

Figure 2.

Keystone grinder #5, with a wooden handle, made by C.I. Co. in Boyertown, PA, USA in the vacuole. The inset shows the grinder by itself.

When it came to carbohydrates, I admit that I was initially stumped. In hindsight, this is partly because I was misdirected by locating, early in my search, an item labeled ‘sugar and fruit crusher’ (Figure 3). On the one hand, can you imagine a better find for my purposes? Short of an implement labeled ‘carbohydrate degrader’, this was about as close as I was going to get. On the other hand, this label led me to try to think of other kitchen tools that would have similar explicit descriptions. Well, there probably are not that many such implements (for example, try to find anything for the kitchen labeled ‘N-linked glycoprotein remover’). However, once you start to think more broadly you realize that there is a plethora of tools that can be used to chop, mash, mince and otherwise break down carbohydrates in the kitchen. In part, this is because there are many choppers that are/were made for herbs and vegetables (these days most people probably use an electric device, but back in the day…). The carbohydrate category ended up containing some tools I considered to be the most intriguing, such as the Foley Food Mill (Figure S2), the Houpt donut cutter, in part because of its pentameric nature (Figure 4), various potato mashers (Figures S3 and S4), and a rolling pasta cutter (Figure 5).

Figure 3.

Wood and metal ‘SUGAR AND FRUIT CRUSHER’ ca 1920s in the vacuole.

Figure 4.

Houpt donut cutter with 5 3-inch cutters, made in Onley, IL, USA in the vacuole. The inset shows the tool by itself.

Figure 5.

Wooden pasta or dough cutter in the vacuole. The inset shows the roller by itself.

Kitchen tools designed to work with lipids were somewhat limited, but most of them are (or at least were) fairly common. For example, consider the Presto butter cutter (Figure S5), shortening blenders, an Edlund egg beater (Figure S6; I could still remember using one like this) or a cheese slicer (Figure S7). I was less familiar with the egg slicers (Figure 6 and S8), and had never actually heard of Dunlap’s sanitary silver blade cream & egg whip (Figure S9).

Figure 6.

Aluminum egg slicer, marked ‘HOUSEHOLD SPECIALTIES’ in the vacuole. The inset shows the slicer alone.

There is no getting around the fact that I simply could not find a kitchen tool specifically designed to break down nucleic acids, and that is probably a good thing. Of course, one of the primary components of a nucleic acid is a carbohydrate, so I suppose you could say there was some overlap with that category. Instead, to fill this ‘gap’, I went in a slightly different direction and decided that the vacuole not only needed tools to degrade individual proteins, lipids and carbohydrates, but also a means of opening up/lysing entire organelles. After all, what happens to peroxisomes or mitochondria once they are delivered essentially intact into the vacuole lumen? This is where various items such as bottle, can and jar openers come into play (Figures 7, 8 and S10). I rounded out this group with a few additional items including a nut sheller (Figure S11), an antique melon scoop (Figure S12), various ice picks (Figure S13) and an ice cube crusher (Figure 9).

Figure 7.

A can opener in the vacuole representing enzymes that play a role in breaking down organelles. The inset shows the opener by itself.

Figure 8.

A different style of can opener in the vacuole. The inset shows the opener by itself.

Figure 9.

Stover steel ‘ICE KUBE KRACKER’, ca 1930s in the vacuole. The inset shows the hand held crusher by itself.

Finally, although not a resident of the vacuole, I decided to ‘throw a small bone’ to the proteasome crowd. I discovered a nut grinder (Figure 10) that reminded me of this degradative complex – it can do a fine job, but obviously has a limited capacity with regard to substrates in comparison to the vacuole.

Figure 10.

The ‘proteasome’ as exemplified by an Anchor Hocking ‘NUT MEAT CHOPPER’ with metal top, glass bottom and wooden handle.

Once the sculpture was complete, I thought about the best way to present it to a reading audience. Photographs were certainly an option, and a series of photos allowed me to show all 6 sides of the vacuole (Figure 11); however, that did not seem entirely in keeping with the antique nature of the implements themselves. As I thought about the possibility of a painting, I knew who I wanted to do the work – Scott Hartley (http://scotthartleywatercolors.com/Gallery%20One.htm), a watercolor artist based in Ann Arbor whose work I had admired for many years. Scott has a distinct style that might be characterized as urban, gritty and highly detailed – perfect for the yeast vacuole.

Figure 11.

The vacuole photographed from 6 sides.

Part 2: the painting

Daniel J. Klionsky: What were your thoughts about the process being represented?

Scott Hartley: I am reminded of a physics professor who got us students visualizing the invisible using models from real life. For example, the way a street light looks in the dark in a snow storm could represent an electron, etc. My perception of the aquarium was of the utensils turning upon each other as they could not escape the walls of the vessel and would to some extent self-destruct as a dysfunctional aspect of the cell.

DJK: That is actually a great comment. The environment in the vacuole/aquarium is indeed a very harsh one and there are a lot of questions about how the inhabitants survive, as well as how the very walls are kept intact. I also like the idea of thinking about this in the sense of ‘what do you see’ rather than a more directed ‘figure out what this represents’ (with the latter suggesting that there is only one answer). The idea that the utensils cannot escape is in fact critical to the safety of the cell – you want to keep all of these potentially dangerous items in a safe location so they do not harm anything else, but are available when you need them.

Maerials and methods

Part 1. the found art sculpture

I have grown carnivorous plants for many years, and these generally do quite well in an aquarium. I happened to have an empty hexagonal aquarium in my garage. It turns out that it is quite difficult to find a large round aquarium, and this hexagonal one was (at this point in time) free – which seemed fitting with the concept of ‘found’ art. I also liked the idea of using an aquarium because it is generally a fluid-filled structure, which would be the case for the vacuole. Thus, with a bit of cleaning, I had my membrane-enclosed, but currently empty, organelle.

In choosing items to fill the vacuole I wanted to meet two primary goals. First, the tools should represent enzymes that can act on the varied substrates present within the vacuole. As mentioned in the Results and Discussion section, tools for pounding, cutting, chopping and grinding proteins (i.e., meat) are easy to obtain, and the problem here was choosing among them, being limited mostly by the size of the aquarium. I was able to find these items at resale stores, consignment shops and on eBay. It was also easy to locate items that were designed for dealing with lipids such as butter slicers. Seemingly less obvious were tools specifically made for carbohydrates, although, again as discussed above, this was primarily because these implements are not typically labeled with the word ‘carbohydrate’. However, once you start to think about the ‘kitchen’ and ‘food’, rather than ‘biology’ and ‘carbohydrates’, you realize there are many items that fit this category.

The second criterion was that the tools would also reflect something about the array of different types of enzymes – in this case with regard to their structure, rather than their substrates – meaning that at the very least there would be not only monomeric tools, but also dimers, trimers, and other oligomers. The 4-bladed meat saw would be one such example, but kitchen tools for carbohydrates have blades that come in many oligomeric forms (Figure 12). Along these lines, I was looking for a 12-bladed tool to represent an Ape1 dodecamer (which would go in the meat digestion section) [9–11], but could not locate such an item; the closest I found was a 16-blade chopper that was interesting (Figure S14), but in the end much too large for my vacuole.

Figure 12.

Dimeric, tetrameric and hexameric hydrolases represented by multi-edged cutting and chopping kitchen tools.

Part 2: the painting

DJK: Do you have any technical comments about the process that can be used in a Materials and Methods section?

SH: My preparation of the subject to draw and paint was based on the notion that one was peering into darkness and illuminating the subject artificially. I put the light source at an angle so as to give the most three-dimensionality to the whole aquarium and to the objects contained within. I chose the angle of viewing after turning the aquarium around and around. It shows the maximum interaction of the objects within, the best value scheme with the point of greatest contrast of light and dark near the middle and, for the best set of intervals of the vertical lines, no two intervals being the same.

I saw objects that were made of different materials and would break down at different rates. I used basic academic methods of blocking out and drawing for both the pencil sketch (Figure 13), to explore the values, and for the enlarged drawing on the watercolor paper. I mention this because I believe that we all apprehend the world around us better by drawing it, sometimes, and make use of the hand-mind partnership in testing and seeing more clearly the things we are inquiring about. In my view, computer graphics cannot substitute for this process. The aquarium was in front of me and I drew and painted directly from the object. In the painting, the aquarium is portrayed as in the dark, illuminated as if a specimen on a slide in a microscope. The surface that the aquarium sits on represents the slide. The fresh transparent watercolor technique (Figure 14) suggests that the objects may very well be translucent to varying degrees in real life. This model suggests to the researcher in me possible experiments to determine ways to assist in the best porosity or filtering quality of the membrane of the cell, or how to assist the diseased cell in breakdown and recycling of the discarded elements.

Figure 13.

The pencil sketch of the final sculpture.

Figure 14.

The yeast vacuole as found art (arrangement by Daniel J. Klionsky), in an original watercolor painting by Scott Hartley.

(And at times it made me a little hungry!)

Funding Statement

This work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences [GM131919].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.