Google is celebrating the 161st birth anniversary of Julius Richard Petri, who invented petri dish, with a doodle on its home page. The doodle features six petri dishes which are swabbed by a hand showing images of bacteria grow and spread in the dishes.

The six petri dishes which when one clicks on the play button are swabbed by a hand. These bacteria go on to form the alphabeths that spell Google.

Born on May 31, 1852, Petri studied medicine at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Academy for Military Physicians in Berlin. He later worked at the Imperial Health Office with Robert Koch who is considered the father of modern bacteriology.

Petri is known to have invented the petri dish in the year 1877 when he was working as an assistant to Robert. He was not the first to use agar to culture bacteria, but he is credited to have invented the standard dish in which it was done. The petri dish allowed for the better identification of bacteria and the diseases they caused.

Petri dishes later moved from the laboratory to classrooms where they are used by every student of biology for various experiments. They are used everywhere from school labs for conducting experiments by students to research facilities where they're used by bacteriologists and other scientists.

The invention paved the way for further research allowing scientists to identify microbes that cause diseases.

Julius Richard Petri died on De.