A Comprehensive Review of the Standard Petri Dish
The Petri dish, a shallow cylindrical glass or plastic lidded container invented by Julius Richard Petri, serves as the foundational laboratory vessel for the cultivation of microorganisms and eukaryotic cells on solid or semi-solid nutrient media.
Its simple yet ingenious design—a flat base with a slightly larger overlapping lid—allows for gaseous exchange while minimizing the risk of airborne contamination, a vital feature for achieving axenic culture conditions necessary for robust scientific study.
From its inception, the Petri dish has been pivotal in advancing the field of microbiology, allowing scientists to isolate and grow pure cultures of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes. This capacity for isolation is fundamental to Koch's postulates, which establish the causative link between a microbe and a specific disease. In the modern laboratory, the utility of the Petri dish extends far beyond basic microbial culture. It is a workhorse in molecular biology for cloning procedures, used to…
