How to Use petri dish in a Sentence

petri dish

noun
  • Or based on some microbes in a petri dish or a study of worms.
    — CBS News, 3 Jan. 2026
  • One day, the cocoa in beloved treats might come from a petri dish.
    — Larissa Zimberoff, The Atlantic, 23 Feb. 2022
  • The lunch counter was spattered and smeared, a Covid petri dish.
    — Scott Johnson, The Hollywood Reporter, 2 July 2023
  • My deck, and maybe yours, is nothing more than a giant petri dish.
    — Tim Carter, Hartford Courant, 7 June 2025
  • These paramecia are like little fuzzy green blobs that whirl around in the petri dish.
    — Quanta Magazine, 19 Dec. 2022
  • But in a Crichton novel, that petri dish must be messed with.
    — Los Angeles Times, 31 May 2024
  • But to his surprise, some of the other rows on the petri dish seemed empty.
    — Max G. Levy, Wired, 30 Nov. 2021
  • But who’s using the town as a petri dish, and why is there a cloning lab buried underground?
    — Matt Kamen, WIRED, 6 July 2024
  • Then, treat the vacant shell as a petri dish where new forms of high-rise urbanism can be hatched.
    — John King, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 Dec. 2022
  • The cyborg brain is essentially just a bunch of brain cells in a petri dish.
    — Joshua Hawkins, BGR, 21 Dec. 2021
  • This molecule could stop the virus from growing in human cells in a petri dish.
    — National Geographic, 28 Apr. 2020
  • The longer a follicle sits in a petri dish, the lower its survival rate.
    — Daniel Fusch, USA Today, 2 Jan. 2026
  • At a small lab table along one wall, a grad student prepared petri dishes.
    — Sallie Tisdale, Harper's Magazine, 16 Oct. 2023
  • Her eggs were harvested and fertilized with sperm from a donor, in a petri dish.
    — Sarah Kowalski, Harper's BAZAAR, 21 Feb. 2018
  • Remove fibroblasts from a petri dish, and skin stem cells struggle to grow.
    — Peter Jurich, Hartford Courant, 22 June 2026
  • Medicinal maggots in a petri dish.
    — Mustafa Fattah, NBC news, 17 May 2026
  • The old forms required a global rating without backup, which is a petri dish for bias.
    — Joan Williams, Fortune, 7 Dec. 2021
  • These are cells that can grow and live outside of a living organism so they can be kept in a petri dish or a flask.
    — Eva Amsen, Forbes, 17 Oct. 2024
  • As a growing city with ambition to burn, the emirate has been a petri dish for bold projects for the past two decades.
    — CNN, 27 Oct. 2022
  • Research shows that a sponge functions better than a lab petri dish as a cozy spot for bacteria to thrive.
    — Alyssa Shaffer, Better Homes & Gardens, 23 Nov. 2024
  • In these little petri dish arts worlds, the voice of the thinker and proselytizer still counts.
    — The Hive, 14 Sep. 2017
  • By their nature, the Olympics could hardly be a better petri dish for the spread of disease.
    — Rachel Axon, USA TODAY, 15 Mar. 2020
  • And the stagnant, shallow water has become a petri dish for algae.
    — New York Times, 31 May 2026
  • The researchers programmed it to walk, crawl, and even grip objects like petri dishes and wooden sticks.
    — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 6 Aug. 2025
  • Getting a wild microbe to take root in a petri dish requires painstaking work, expert skills, and a lot of luck.
    — Monique Brouillette, Wired, 18 Dec. 2020
  • One option calls for taking the frozen sperm and using it to fertilize rhino eggs in a petri dish.
    — Alessandra Potenza, The Verge, 6 Apr. 2018
  • Now the lab is working on taking cells from tissue in the nasal cavity and growing them in a petri dish.
    — Nicole Kagan, Los Angeles Times, 29 Sep. 2022
  • Many countries limit the amount of time that a human embryo can be kept alive in a petri dish to 14 days.
    — Kristen V. Brown, The Atlantic, 8 Oct. 2024
  • The staging ground for their relationship squabbles has grown from a petri dish to the cosmos.
    — Cecilia D'anastasio, Wired, 1 Apr. 2021
  • Years of improper cleaning can turn them into a petri dish rather than a pretty place to chop veggies.
    — Heather Bien, Southern Living, 5 June 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'petri dish.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: