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pe·tri dish | \ ˈpē-trē- 
\
\Definition of petri dish
1 : a small shallow dish of thin glass or plastic with a loose cover used especially for cultures in bacteriology
2 : something (such as a place or situation) that fosters development or innovation
the college was a petri dish for radical views
Examples of petri dish in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web The team then grew brain organoids — 3D blobs of brain tissue just a few millimeters wide and only just visible to the naked eye — from these cells by nurturing them in a petri dish with a growth factor.
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Katie Hunt, CNN, "Scientists have grown mini brains containing Neanderthal DNA," 18 June 2020 Conspiracy theories thrive in times of great uncertainty, and the coronavirus pandemic has proven to be a petri dish for particularly harmful ones.
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Megan Molteni, Wired, "Can a Keyboard Crusade Stem the Vaccine Infodemic?," 15 June 2020 Cleaning a floating petri dish: How is a cruise ship sanitized after a coronavirus outbreak?
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Morgan Hines, USA TODAY, "Tech cruise ships could implement to combat spread of coronavirus: far-UVC sanitation, contact tracing," 1 June 2020 Instead, a seventy-two-hour delay by Japanese officials in locking down the vessel after the notification of the first case turned the ship into a floating petri dish.
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Mark Honigsbaum, The New York Review of Books, "‘A Once-in-a-Century Pathogen’: The 1918 Pandemic & This One," 17 Mar. 2020 Floating petri dish Passenger Arnold Hopland, a primary-care physician from Tennessee, provided some hints as to what went wrong.
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Beth Mole, Ars Technica, "Americans on coronavirus cruise ship barred from US after failed quarantine," 19 Feb. 2020 Those quarters become petri dishes for spreading illness.
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Chris Solari, Detroit Free Press, "Opinion: Examining the hurdles before college football can return in fall," 20 May 2020 Immigration attorneys and public health experts have warned for weeks that the detention centers, jails and prisons are petri dishes for deadly coronavirus contagion.
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Dianne Solis, Dallas News, "11 immigrants sue ICE, seeking release from Alvarado detention center where coronavirus has spread," 20 May 2020 The vaccine safely created antibodies robust enough to stop the virus from replicating in a petri dish, and which were similar in number and strength to those found in people who have recovered from COVID-19.
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Popular Science, "President Trump says he’s taking hydroxychloroquine—but that doesn’t mean you should," 18 May 2020
See MoreThese example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'petri dish.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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More Definitions for petri dish
petri dish
nounpe·tri dish | \ ˈpē-trē- \
\Medical Definition of petri dish
: a small shallow dish of thin glass or plastic with a loose cover used especially for cultures in bacteriology
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Time Traveler for petri dish
The first known use of petri dish was in 1892
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