VALENCIA - As Spanish microbiologist Pilar Bosch was casting around for a subject to investigate for her PhD in 2008, she stumbled across a paper suggesting that bacteria, her field, could be used in art restoration, her mother's own area of expertise.

At that same moment, her mother - Pilar Roig - was struggling to restore 18th-century paintings by Antonio Palomino in one of the oldest churches in Spain's third city, Valencia.

She was finding it particularly difficult to remove glue that had been used to pull the frescoes from the walls of Santos Juanes church during restoration work in the 1960s.

"My mother had a very difficult problem to solve and I found a paper about bacteria used to clean frescoes in Italy," Bosch, 42, said.

She did her PhD on that project. And more than a decade later, daughter and mother have joined forces on a 4-million-euro (S$5.7 million) project, funded by local foundations, to use some of the techniques to restore the artworks in Valencia.

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