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A Petri dish is a shallow glass or plastic cylindrical dish that biologists use to culture microbes. It was named after the German bacteriologist Mr.Petri (1785-1925)
This should say "Julius Richard Petri"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Richard_Petri
I took a quick scan of some online dictionaries. Most of them do not capitalize "petri dish".
chouhouzi 14:17, 10 DEC 2008
Most paper dictionaries do not capitalize either, nor is capitalization the common usage in scientific writing. The article has been fixed. Piperh (talk) 19:29, 12 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Petri should not contain a capital P. If you read scientific texts it will usually be capitalised. Search Pubmed or something for an article containing Petri dishes for examples, it's pretty much universally capital P.
Just a quick addition to this discusson. I am publishing a book with MIT Press and the editors changed it to lower case P, even though that still seems weird to me. FWIW. --Jyoshimi (talk) 17:42, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
although both of the pictures included are visuably appealing, i'm not sure that they are encyclopedaic enough, as neither clearly shows the standard laboratory usage of petri dishes (especially the one on the left) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.112.109.133 (talk • contribs) .
Although the current picture is nice, it could be confusing for someone who doesn't know what a Petri dish is. If you ask me, I'll tell you that by looking a the picture it looks like circular floating extraterrestrial beings. 165.123.140.215 10:01, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
According to Merriam-Webster: Syracuse watch glass, Syracuse dish: a small circular flat-bottomed dish of thick glass with a shallow depression used in biology (as for staining, culturing, and various phases of microtechnic).
Biologicalworld.com has spammed wikipedia like no tomorrow. He is a site of only a few pages and a LOT of adsense. Not much information is given except for "protocols" which are not referenced, and cannot be trusted from a site of that quality.
Can Petri dishes be used under microscopes? I had heard that they could not be, but not from a reliable source. Does anyone know? Raptortech97 (talk) 21:28, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It just depends on the type of microscope. I routinely put plates under a disecting microscope to look at colony morphology. It depends on where the light comes from. Very few (if any) microscopes that require light to be shined through a sample will work with a petri plate. But scopes that shine light onto a sample from the same side as the lens might work. Adenosinetalk01:03, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with user:Adenosine about the positioning of the light source being important. However, Petri dishes are sometimes used for mammalian cell culture as an alternative to tissue culture flasks. In that case the cells can be viewed using an Inverted microscope. Of course these dishes don't contain any agar which is one of the things that prevents you from using the same technique on a standard bacterial culture plate. Ka Faraq Gatri (talk) 10:17, 17 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]