Scientists of Top Institute Food & Nutrition, Wageningen University and Research Centre, NIZO food research and the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology in the Netherlands have developed a new technology that allows unprecedented miniaturisation of the growth of micro-organisms.
On a chip with the size of a postage stamp, more than one million cultures can be grown in parallel which opens up a wide range of uses from diagnosis of infection to the improvement of industrial bacteria. The corresponding paper ‘The micro Petri dish, a million-well chip for the culture and high-throughput screening of microorganisms’ has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (online Early Edition) on 7th November 2007.
A team of microbiologists and micro-engineering experts developed the chip that has the potential to meet the automation and miniaturisation needs of modern microbiology. The development of high-throughput bacterial screening methods has been slow in an era of advancements in fields like genomics and proteomics. The ‘micro Petri dish’ allows growth assays to catch up with other high-throughput technologies in the life sciences. ‘Besides that, the chip is readily manufactured, cheap and easy-to-use in a standard microbiology lab’ explain researchers Colin Ingham (WUR) and Johan van Hylckama Vlieg (NIZO).