Petri dish takes pics with cell phone camera
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Since the late 1800s, biologists have used petri dishes primarily to grow cells. In the medical field, they are used to identify bacterial infections, such as tuberculosis. Conventional use of a petri dish requires that the cells being cultured be placed in an incubator to grow. As the sample grows, it is removed—often numerous times—from the incubator to be studied under a microscope.
Not so with the ePetri, whose platform does away with the need for bulky microscopes and significantly reduces human labor time, while improving the way in which the culture growth can be recorded.
“Our ePetri dish is a compact, small, lens-free microscopy imaging platform. We can directly track the cell culture or bacteria culture within the incubator,” explains Guoan Zheng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in electrical engineering at Caltech. “The data from the ePetri dish automatically transfers to a computer outside the incubator by a cable connection. Therefore, this technology can significantly streamline and improve cell culture experiments by cutting down on human labor and contamination risks.”
Source: Futurity: Research News