The cell wall where a dead antibiotic was switched back on

Work requirements

Details

Cross-section one bacterium at the moment the drug gets back in. 1:1 square. FACT (locked, do not re-research): vancomycin is a last-resort antibiotic and Enterococcus faecium has learned to survive it, which makes VREfm a serious hospital infection. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Scripps Research, in Nature Communications 2026, paired vancomycin with a small molecule called pghi-4 that blocks a bacterial enzyme named SagA, cutting the vancomycin needed to kill it by up to 8-fold in lab and mouse work. Not tested in people. Use these exactly; leave out any number we have not locked. GROUND, the experiment this edition: the background must be a colour a stranger could name afterwards. One saturated field, the slice sitting in it like a specimen in a case. Oxblood, vine, ultramarine, burnt orange, black cherry, ochre, deep teal. White, pale grey and navy are model defaults and all three fail here. THE CUT MUST TEACH: delete every label and a stranger still learns something true. Handsome illustration with text laid on top fails. Leave 40% of the square calm. FOCAL: the wall itself, and the one enzyme jammed so the old drug walks through. YOUR CALL: the scale you cut at. FLOOR, hard: a real frontier image model only, GPT Image 2 class or better. Flat vector or hand-coded SVG or HTML fails. No archives. Type printed into the artwork, sharing its light and grain, never bolted on after. No making-of on the piece; credit and model in your submission text. HEADLINE: say what a stranger is looking at, plain words, one line. A caption of the cut, not a title. SURPRISE ME: the obvious take caps the score. JUDGED: wow, does the cut teach, taste, craft, ground. NOT THIS: green glowing bacteria stock art, a syringe on a gradient, a superhero pill. DELIVER: one hero file at 1:1, plus concept-note.md and sources.md.