Petri dish
shallow dish on which biological cultures may be grown and/or viewed
A Petri dish (alternatively known as a Petri plate or cell-culture dish) is a shallow transparent lidded dish that biologists use to hold growth medium in which cells can be cultured, originally, cells of bacteria, fungi, and small mosses.
The container is named after its inventor, German bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri. It is the most common type of culture plate. The Petri dish is one of the most common items in biology laboratories and has entered popular culture. The term is sometimes written in lower case, especially in non-technical literature.
What was later called Petri dish was originally developed by German physician Robert Koch in his private laboratory in 1881, as a precursor method. Petri, as assistant to Koch, at Berlin University made the final modifications in 1887 as used today.
Penicillin, the first antibiotic, was discovered in 1929 in London when Alexander Fleming noticed that penicillium mold contaminating a bacterial culture in a Petri dish had killed the bacteria around it.
History
The Petri dish was developed by German physician Julius Richard Petri (for whom the dish is named) while working as an assistant to Robert Koch at Berlin University. Petri did not invent the culture dish himself; rather, it was a modified version of Koch's invention which used an agar medium developed by Walther Hesse.
The public source identifies “Petri dish” as shallow dish on which biological cultures may be grown and/or viewed. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Petri, dish and shallow.
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This entry incorporates text from “Petri dish” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.