The effectiveness of glass beads for plating cell cultures

Abstract Cell plating and subsequent colony growth is an important laboratory procedure in microbiology. A common protocol for cell culture plating in Petri dishes uses glass beads to spread cells on the surface of the solid growth media. Here we perform an experimental analysis and mathematical modelling of cell plating. We introduce a new class of billiard - shifting billiard, which serves as a conceptual abstraction of the cell plating with glass beads. Numerical analysis of the dynamics of this simple yet efficient billiard, indicates a close relationship between plate movement and quality of colony distribution. Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae suspensions at different cell concentrations were used to confirm our theoretical observations.