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The release of oxygen from polystyrene Petri dishes

Department of Physics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

This excerpt was created in the absence of an abstract.

There have been many reports regarding radiobiologically significant amounts of oxygen dissolved in plastic dishes (Chapman et al., 1968 and 1970; Boag, 1969). Recently Davies and Baker (1970) showed this indirectly by comparing the equilibration of several millilitres of water in a plastic and a glass Petri dish. The method of equilibration was by rapid flushing of nitrogen over the dish. Their results suggested that it would take several days (at a rate of approximately 12 hours per ten-fold decrease in oxygen tension) to reach an oxygen concentration of less than 0·03 micromolar in the liquid contained in a plastic dish. Also, Chapman et al., (1970) showed that for a 0·1 cm thick slab of polystyrene the effusion rate of oxygen declined at a rate of about eight hours per ten-fold change. The equations describing oxygen effusion from plastic depend upon exp (-²Dt/4a²) for (Dt/a)>0·2, where D is the diffusion coefficient, t is time, and 2a is the thickness of the plastic (Chapman et al., 1970). However, the thickness of 60 mm tissue culture polystyrene Petri dishes (Falcon) normally used in North America is only 0·065 cm. Therefore, in actual practice with this thickness the oxygen concentration should fall by a factor of 10 in 3·4 hours.

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