Researchers view cells using mobile phone image sensor

The team at Caltech built the Petri dish platform prototype using a Google smart phone, a commercially available cell-phone image sensor and Lego building blocks. The result is a system that lets researchers acquire and save images of the cells as they are growing, in real time.

Conventional use of a petri dish requires that the cells being cultured be placed in an incubator to grow. As the sample grows, it is removed — often numerous times — from the incubator to be studied under a microscope.

The ePetri removes the need for microscopes, which biologists have been using to observe growing cultures since the late 1800s. The culture is placed on the image-sensor chip, while the phone’s LED screen is used as a scanning light source. The chip automatically transfers data to a computer via cable, all from inside the incubator.

‘Our ePetri dish is a compact, small, lens-free microscopy imaging platform. We can directly track the cell culture or bacteria culture within the incubator,’ explained Guoan Zheng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in electrical engineering at Caltech. ‘Therefore, this technology can significantly streamline and improve cell culture experiments by cutting down on human labour and contamination risks.’