Why incubated upside down

The evaporation of water from media can cause media dryness that can affect the microbial growth but when the plates are incubated in an inverted position, the rate of evaporation decreases that results in proper microbial growth. Therefore, Petri dishes with media can also be stored for a longer period in an inverted position. The lid of Petri dishes may contain any contamination that spreads on the media and grows with the sample microbes. This may create an error in microbial count determination.

It is easy to handle the inverted Petri dishes because the lid of the Petri dish may open during handling when incubated in normal position and it may cause contamination from air.

We label the Petri dishes at the bottom part because lid may exchange with other Petri dishes creating confusion and inverted position makes it easy to read the labeling of Petriplates.

Above advantages are noticed by me during my working in pharmaceuticals. Pin it. Ankur Choudhary is India's first professional pharmaceutical blogger, author and founder of Pharmaceutical Guidelines, a widely-read pharmaceutical blog since Sign-up for the free email updates for your daily dose of pharmaceutical tips.

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This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. More info. Petri dishes are inverted during incubation to prevent condensation from falling into the microbes, thereby contaminating samples. Condensation in Petri dishes causes bacterial samples to spread and potentially mix with each other. Warm incubators tend to attract more condensation, so the dishes are inverted. Inversion allows water to drip down onto the lid, away from the agar, rather than onto bacteria.

Inversion also prevents contamination of other bacteria in the samples, in case Petri dishes were not thoroughly cleaned or other microbes happened to contaminate samples.