Spiral Plater/Diluter

A spiral plater is an instrument used to dispense a liquid sample onto a Petri dish in a spiral pattern. The spiral diluter additionally enables serial dilutions with high accuracy. Commonly used as part of a CFU count procedure for the purpose of determining the number of microbes in the sample. In this setting, after spiral plating, the Petri dish is incubated for several hours after which the number of colony forming microbes (CFU) is determined. Spiral platers are also used for research, clinical diagnostics and as a method for covering a Petri dish with bacteria before placing antibiotic discs for AST.