Pathogens (applicable to healthcare, technical, food safety, sanitation, etc.)

[firxworx]

Icon name

bacteria, germs, virus, phage, amoeba, petri-dish, parasite, bacteria-culture

Use cases

Pathogens (especially human pathogens) aka bacteria, germs, viruses, etc. icons are super useful in all kinds of healthcare scenarios including dentistry, veterinary, etc.

However please consider how these types of icons have piles of use-cases outside of healthcare:

• technical contexts such as computer viruses, worms, etc.
• food handling, food safety, quality assurance, sanitation
• cleaning supplies, training materials, labels
• laboratory and scientific scenarios -- even archaeology!
• travel
• insurance, risk, etc.
• educational contexts from preschool to PhD

I love the Lucide icon set and how the whole "family" fits together. Thank-you contributors!

Note there is an open PR for a virus icon, and there are other healthcare / anatomy type requests, but I couldn't find anything that focused in on the broader concept of "pathogens" and their widespread applicability.

#3286

This is pretty open-ended friendly request depending on what the amazing community wants to take a stab at. Honestly any additions to Lucide in this general topic/concept would be awesome.

Design ideas

Search for "bacteria shapes" to get an idea: cocci (round), bacilli (rod), spiral, etc.

There's a nice graphic on this Wikipedia page that could easily serve as the inspiration for icons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_cellular_morphologies

Search for "virus shapes": helical, icosahedral, spherical (possibly with spikes like the now-widely-recognized SARS-CoV-2 virus), complex (such as a "bacteriophage" or "phage" shape with a "diamond-like head"), etc.

For amoeba think "splatter blob":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba

For petri dishes and cultures search for "bacterial culture" images. It'd be nice to have a "clean" one too.

There are all kinds of parasites and worms out there, searching for images there can give a lot of results.
A parasite pathogen worm would be different than the worm icon that Lucide already has (e.g. add "hairs" or "legs" to it).

Some concepts that might be more challenging to depict include mold and fungal pathogens but there are ideas out there if you search for icon.

Checklist

• I have searched if someone has submitted a similar issue before and there weren't any. (Please make sure to also search closed issues, as this issue might already have been resolved.)
• I have searched existing icons to make sure it does not already exist and I didn't find any.
• I am not requesting a brand logo and the art is not protected by copyright, see more at https://github.com/lucide-icons/lucide/blob/main/BRAND_LOGOS_STATEMENT.md
• I am not requesting an icon that includes religious, war/violence related, political imagery or hate symbols.
• I have provided appropriate use cases for the icon(s) requested.

[karsa-mistmere]

Hey @firxworx,

Thanks a lot for the thorough write-up and all the thought you’ve put into this request — there are definitely a lot of interesting ideas in here!

To help us keep things organized and make it easier for contributors to pick up individual icons, could you please split this into separate issues, one for each concept (e.g. bacterium, phage, amoeba, petri-dish, etc.)?

When creating each one, it would be super helpful if you could:

• Specify a few clear use cases — not just the broad category, but concrete contexts where the icon could be used
• Include specific design ideas instead of just “search for this and that,” since Google results can differ greatly between users

Here's a small example of what I mean (note the emphasised keywords that will help us add the appropriate tags to the icon):

Icon name

bacterium

Use cases

• to represent malware in a security app
• to mark contamination risk in a food safety dashboard
• to show germs on a cleaning product label
• to indicate bacterial samples in a lab management tool
• to mark health alerts in a travel app
• to visualise infection risk in an insurance form or report
• to symbolise microbiology in general

Design ideas

[karsa-mistmere]

In the meantime, here are a few initial drafts:

Open lucide studio

Open lucide studio

Open lucide studio