Hi! I'm considering growing bacteria in agar in petri dishes. However, I have heard that once bacteria have grown in the agar, you should not open the dish for safety reasons. I would like to ask: What are the risks? What should I and shouldn’t I do to avoid growing harmful bacteria? And if it is best not to reopen the dish, then what is the point of using them, if you cannot apply the microbes to a slide to be analyzed under a microscope?

For me Its okay we did that on our class but you must wear proper lab gowns, mask and gloves to prevent you from harm from the bacteria.

The risks are often dependent on the bacteria that you are growing. If you're growing a mouth or throat swab, you might breathe in Streptococcus sp.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streptococcus

 

That is not something that you would want to breathe in. In general, you would want to use septic technique and keep a flame nearby. People do open the dishes, but that is often to take a sample from the dish and do something with it, such as grow another bacteria colony on another dish (perhaps to isolate the colony from the dish from other colonies).

 

I would suggest you take a microbiology course at a community college or university rather than culture bacteria yourself. You could also read microbiology books. It's not impossible to do your own microbiology, but I don't see the point in doing it unless you're a researcher. A lot is already known about microbiology. Unless you're getting into molecular biology or there is some extravagant unknown organism that you're coming across and want to identify it before others (this generally requires training/education in microbiology, anyway), I don't see the point in what you're doing.

Edited April 13, 201411 yr by Genecks

If you do not know precisely on the plate, do not expose yourself to it.

Or get someone else to do it first.

.... no.