Conventional Petrie dishes used for procedures such as observation, growth, expansion, biopsy and manipulation of mammalian cells are not unique and are mostly generic. The user usually has to add droplets or media pools to the flat surface of the dish and then use it for the particular purpose. The media pools are thus randomly placed in the Petrie dish, and thus the technician must spend additional time locating the various media pools and observing the specimens in the individual media pools. The time spent can be minutes to tens of minutes. The standard Petrie dish thus complicates the process of monitoring specimen growth and development, and complicates the ability to tell which specimen is which.
One problem with using generic Petri dishes in specimen procedures is that they do not have unique dish configurations which enhance their utility in such procedures. Another problem with the current dishes is that they require the user to use micro drops of a specimen medium solution on the surface of the dish. Some dishes may create surface tension problems with the specimen medium solution. This can result in the micro drops collapsing and the media solution that the sample is in then becomes compromised by an overlain layer of oil. The reverse may happen too and the droplets may not adhere well to the bottom of the dish causing them to move in the dish.
It would be highly desirable to provide a specimen treatment dish assembly that will inherently locate the specimen being treated in a definite predetermined location in the dish and retain the specimen in that definite location. It would be further desirable to provide a specimen treatment dish assembly which does not require movement of the optics, such as a microscope, to observe and log the changes in the several specimens being treated in the dish.