​From Escher’s drawings, islamic geometric art, Penrose’s puzzles, mineral structures and fracture resistant material design for multiple applications, one thing is always true: tessellations are simply beautiful. Looking at them, getting lost, being immersed in illusions is mesmerizing. Making them whether piece by piece like a jig-saw puzzle, or with a ruler and a compass, or with your programmed algorithms in computer program, is such a joyful and mind stimulating process as well. (I use Procreate to manually make tessellations by making the shapes first and then tiling them like making a jig-saw puzzle, so my tessellations are not as perfectly tiled when you do the same with a vector based application that can attach shapes node-to-node, but it is my process, and I love it. Emphasis on the process! A process which eventually brings me to microbiology and bioprocess design & engineering again. 

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Can microbial biofilms form tessellated patterns?​

Microbial colonies can form beautiful patterns, some grow as fractals some with wrinkles, typically observed in single or dual-species colonies on agar surfaces. As for tessellations, only a few papers report such phenomena, limited mainly to Voronoi tessellations. But are there other tessellated patterns in the microbial world? This is a difficult quest, I know,  as the microbial world is quite dynamic.Yet, the pursuit itself is valuable. It is great to contemplate these possibilities—even if microbial biofilms prove too dynamic, or if such patterns are exceptionally rare, or even impossible. Asking such questions invariably leads to discovery, often revealing new insights, even if they aren't what we initially set out to find. In the meantime I can focus on grow my own tessellated grown microbial biofilms for specific applications by confining them, or tessellated surfaces to embrace certain behavior of microbes.