Engineers at the California Institute of Technology have upgraded the basic petri dish found in science labs across the globe.
Caltech Engineers Build Smart Petri Dish
At Caltech an imaging sensor of a smart phone is being used to gain images of cell cultures as they grow. Helping the researchers gain a much better objective of how to solve riddles of cell culture.
The engineering student Guoan Zheng and his team of classmates used a Google smart phone, commercially available cell-phone image sensor and Lego building blocks to come up with the new generation of petri dishes. Guoan Zheng said that their ePetri dish was a compact, small, lens-free microscopy imaging platform.
What came up was a smart and cheap Petri dish which could be studied in real time even during incubation. The sensor views the cultured cells, the android phone passed on the information to an external laptop outside the incubation zone. As per Zheng this technology can significantly streamline and improve cell culture experiments by cutting down on human labor and contamination risks.
Caltech biologist Michael Elowitz explains that the ePetri captures data dynamically, following events over time in live cells, and across a wide range of spatial scales from the subcellular to the macroscopic. The technology is a boon to image confluent cells which grow in clusters very close to each other and cover up the entire dish.