Hybrid breath figure method: A new insight in Petri dishes for cell culture

The traditional Petri dish, which has not been changed in almost 60 years, has clear limitations when it is applied to cell cultures in a modern biological laboratory. In this work, by integrating the advantages of both the semidirect breath figure (sDBF) method and the traditional breath figure (BF) method, we proposed for the first time a novel hybrid BF method for the fabrication of honeycomb-patterned Petri dishes with mPEG self-assembly in the pores. Due to the amphiphilic structure of mPEG, the active OH groups of mPEG were located inside the pores of the dishes, which could covalently couple with other functional materials. For instance, in this work, an antibacterial agent was immobilized onto the dish surface via a typical coupling reaction. Because of the size difference between the bacteria and cells, the prepared dishes had selective antibacterial activity but noncytotoxicity against mammalian cells. The present hybrid BF method provides a new insight for endowing commercial PS Petri dishes or other membranes with special topographical structures and functions, which could solve the long-term challenges of cell cultures in the future.