OxyPlate™

The New Standard for Anaerobic Culture

The cultivation of anaerobic microorganisms has long been a complex and costly challenge for clinical and research laboratories. Anaerobic chambers and jars are often inefficient, expensive, and introduce workflow bottlenecks.

The OxyPlate™ is a groundbreaking solution designed to fundamentally solve these problems. It integrates the entire anaerobic environment into a single, re-sealable culture plate, eliminating the need for bulky equipment and streamlining your entire workflow.

At a Glance…

Self-Contained Anaerobiosis: No external chambers, jars, or gas packs required.
Simple Workflow: Inoculate at your bench and incubate in a standard aerobic incubator.
Uninterrupted Access: Plates can be opened and closed repeatedly without compromising the anaerobic environment.
Cost-Effective: Eliminates the recurring costs of gas packs and specialized chamber gases.
Scientifically Validated: Proven performance comparable to the “gold standard” of anaerobic chambers.

The Problem with Traditional Methods

The Chamber Conundrum

High Capital and Operational Costs

Demanding Footprint in Space-Constrained Laboratories

Operationally Cumbersome and Uncomfortable to Use

Prone to Breakdown and Requires Specialized Service

The Hidden Costs of Jars and Gas Packs

Restrictive Batch-Based Workflow

Labor-Intensive and Time-Consuming

Recurring Consumable Expenses

Inherent Inefficiencies, Risking Exposure to Detrimental Oxygen.

The OxyPlate™ Advantage

The OxyPlate™ was engineered to fundamentally resolve the core pain points of traditional anaerobic culture. It is not an incremental improvement but a complete re-imagining of the process that encapsulates all best practices into a single, self-contained product.

A Streamlined, Cost-Saving Workflow

The OxyPlate’s unique design simplifies the anaerobic workflow to its most basic elements.

Inoculation: Streak the plate on a standard laboratory bench in an open, aerobic environment.
Sealing: Place the lid over the base and turn clockwise to activate the unique track-and-key seal.
Incubation: Incubate the sealed plate in a standard aerobic incubator, freeing up valuable space in specialized equipment.

The most critical operational advantage is the re-sealable design. The plates can be opened and closed repeatedly to check for growth, and the anaerobic environment will regenerate each time without the need for a gassing step. This shift from a rigid, batch-based system to an isolate-by-isolate workflow provides dramatic labor savings and eliminates the costly recurring expense of gas packs.

The Science of Self-Generated Anaerobiosis

At the heart of the OxyPlate’s innovation is the patented OxyDish™, which functions as a self-contained anaerobic chamber. This is made possible by the Oxyrase® Enzyme System, a mixture of membrane-bound monooxygenases and dioxygenases. Unlike chemical methods that use hydrogen or iron powder, this biological process actively and efficiently removes dissolved oxygen from the agar and the dish’s headspace by reducing it directly to water.

This action creates a “truly oxygen-free” environment and, crucially, a “reduced environment,” which is physiologically necessary for anaerobes to produce energy and grow.

Built-In Best Practices

The OxyPlate™ is manufactured Pre-Reduced Anaerobically Sterilized (PRAS), a key best practice for anaerobic culturing. The Oxyrase® Enzyme System is used during manufacturing to prevent oxidation, ensuring the plates arrive reduced and ready-to-use without any post-reduction preparation. Additionally, this ensures your lab has the ability to reliably isolate fastidious anaerobic bacteria.

This built-in feature removes a complex, user-dependent variable from the anaerobic workflow, contributing to more reliable and economical results.

“By using plated media (containing the oxygen-reducing substance) to isolate and identify anaerobic bacteria, a single technologist could report culture results more rapidly because all cultures—aerobic and anaerobic—for a patient could be processed simultaneously.”

Muriel Thurston, Dawn Maida, Colleen Gannon, Oxyrase Cell-Membrane Preparations Simplify Cultivation of Anaerobic Bacteria, Laboratory Medicine, Volume 31, Issue 9, September 2000, Pages 509–512

Scientific Validation: Evidence of Performance

The CDC Evaluation (2000)

A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) evaluated the OxyPlate™’s ability to support the growth of 251 clinically significant anaerobic and facultatively anaerobic strains. The study compared growth on OxyPlates™ to growth in a flexible glove box anaerobic chamber. The findings showed robust performance, with 70.1% of the strains showing equal growth on both the OxyPlate™ and the anaerobe chamber at 72 hours of incubation. The study concluded that the OxyPlate™ would be a “useful addition to the clinical microbiology laboratory…”.

Read the Study

The Labspec Evaluation (2016)

A more recent evaluation compared Oxyrase agar media (Schaedler OxyPlate and Brucella OxyPRAS) to conventional media. The study found that bacterial concentrations and colony sizes on the Oxyrase plates were “similar to control plates” that had been inoculated and incubated in an anaerobic chamber. The study’s Phase II also demonstrated that the Oxyrase selective media successfully inhibited the growth of common aerobic species like S. aureus and E. coli, allowing for the successful isolation of target anaerobic species.

Read the Study

Experience the OxyPlate™ Difference

See how our self-contained, re-sealable plates can simplify your process, save valuable time, and provide scientifically validated performance that is comparable to the “gold standard” of anaerobic chambers.

Request a sample today to discover the unprecedented convenience and control you’ll get with OxyPlates™.

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Anaerobic Culture Products