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

plasma or plasma

[smoothnorman]

Perhaps someone else wondered (given that this is an article about microbiology) if the "plasmas" in the summary is of the 'blood plasma' sort or rather the ionized gas sort. You may save yourself a click: it's the latter; and its function is mostly to sterilize to sample space. Now as to the ease of subsequent sterile access to the bag, versus a dish with a lid, i leave that to the imagination of the gloved and harried lab tech.

(http://www.etymonline.com/ plasma 1712, "form, shape" (earlier plasm, 1620), from L.L. plasma, from Gk. plasma "something molded or created," from plassein "to mold," originally "to spread thin," from PIE *plath-yein, from base *pele- "flat, to spread" (see plane (1)). Sense of "liquid part of blood" is from 1845; that of "ionized gas" is 1928)