Plasma-Filled Bags Could Replace the Petri Dish

Zothecula writes "The humble Petri dish may soon be a thing of the past. A team of researchers in Germany have developed a new technique for treating plastic bags with plasma to turn them into sealed, sterile containers suitable for microbiology work with much less chance of contamination than traditional containers. This holds the promise of not only decreasing the possibility of contamination in stem cell and live-cell therapy techniques, but also the potential for cultivating whole human organs for transplant surgery."

Comments

HeLa

[bcrowell]

Contamination has been a huge issue in human cell research. A line called HeLa contaminated a large number of experiments, meaning that basically all the research on human cells in vitro from an entire era was called into doubt. The story of the HeLa line is remarkable; they are immortal cancer cells from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. The cells weren't just contaminants; they played a major positive role in a lot of science. Lacks was never asked her permission, and her family never knew for decades afterward that her cells had made such a contribution to medicine.