Hi,

I will recommend you to not use oven as a incubator. These 2 instruments are design very differently for different purpose.

In OVEN the air flow is very high / without airflow oven having much more heat from bottom. in this case high air and high temperature will remove moisture from your petri-plates, even if you seal with paraffin tape, the moisture will come out from media and may remain within plate but media will loose its consistency.

While, in case of incubator, a air with temperature will be distributed evenly in each corner of incubator, but in oven this provision is not available. so, don't use oven as a incubator.

I hope this information might clear your doubt..

Good luck !!

Hi Mac: It is very dry, you should control the humidity. 

Hi, 

hot air oven can use bacteria growth as Bacillus ,Lactobacillus , ......etc.

I used it for yogurt samples production at 43 C

You must provide a suitable humidity and you should prevent high uncontrolled temp. 

If it will hold true at 37C it will work.

I used an old oven once with Mycobacterium smegmatis cultures and a tube roller. Just before use i set its old non-digital thermometer dial with a scale from 1 to 10 to somewhere in-between 1 and 2 until i had nice consistent 37C. Then added my tube mixer and culture. 

One problem i didn't expect to have was when the tube mixer was on constantly the temp would go above the 37 due to it heating up and adding to the ovens temp. 

The para-film on my plates would not last as long too, maybe due to the low humidity inside the oven...

Best Wishes!

Hi,

I will recommend you to not use oven as a incubator. These 2 instruments are design very differently for different purpose.

In OVEN the air flow is very high / without airflow oven having much more heat from bottom. in this case high air and high temperature will remove moisture from your petri-plates, even if you seal with paraffin tape, the moisture will come out from media and may remain within plate but media will loose its consistency.

While, in case of incubator, a air with temperature will be distributed evenly in each corner of incubator, but in oven this provision is not available. so, don't use oven as a incubator.

I hope this information might clear your doubt..

Good luck !!

Basically you can do this but you have to take into account some problems:

i) oven or hor air oven are not constructed to very precise control of temperature, there is temperature fluctuation  bigger in comparison to incubator.

ii) as mentioned above, the drying of agar broth could appear

Best regards

Vit

maybe, but you need to provide moisture for the growth and suitable temperature. 

Is the equipment that you have? Can you regulate the temperatura? Once that you have put the temperature that you want, is it stable? If you answers were yes, then you can use it.

This question also previously arose in my mind..but Incubators meant for microbiology purpose are far more accurate and reliable for growing microbial cultures..which generally dosnt require to go beyond 50 degrees C. Hot air ovens are used to sterilizing glass wares and other lab instruments..They are normally used at a higher temperature and they dont have a properly maintined air flow throughout the chamber that might lead to drying up of the agar plates and result in no growth of the bacteria on it. Also there are chances of other contamination inside as it requires to be cleaned and fumigated to maintain the sterility ..else contaminant might grow.

This question is challenging in the sense that most of the oven have  very open heat and should not be used as incubators for microbial cultures. The oven will likely melt the media and liquefy it. You realize that the humidity conditions in an incubator is always high and microorganisms like this conditions as opposed to hot air oven.

BOTH EQUIPMENT ARE DESIGNED FOR DIFFERENT PURPOSES.

Secondly,  the temperature in hot air oven is meant to be much higher than the ambient or even 37oC optimum for many bacteria.

Another problem is the fine temp. control in hot air oven is rather crude as it is designed to work around 160-180 oC. I

may point out that humidity in the incubator will not be different than what is outside in the lab unless the manufacturer has made additional provision of humidity control like in a BOD incubator.

The very purpose of hot air oven is to dry sterilize and hence no question of any humidity.  

The gist of the story is hot air oven is not a substitute for an incubator. If the temp. you want is near ambient then you can as well keep the plates in a plastic container on the lab table itself. 

Another option is to check if any other dept in your institute is having an incubator so that you can keep your plates. 

i will adivise you to not use oven for microbial incubation. but use for the sterilization purpse only

It can be done if you rig up a temperature controller to the power so that the oven turns off and on as required to maintain the right temperature. Good chance the switch will overheat if not done properly, so you'll need someone who knows what they're doing to help. Unlikely it'll pass risk assessment. Put in a big pot of water to keep the whole thing humid. You can do the same thing but with cooling with an old fridge so you can maintain the right temperature for making lager or maturing cheese. Youtube is your friend here.

On the other hand, don't they run a Microbiology BSc at Wolverhampton. Maybe just use one of the incubators?

It is not ideal to use an hot air oven to incubate as the temperature is too high-performance. Even if you adjust the temperature to incubation the air distribution cannot be even

I agree with everyone else here. It is well worth the money to purchase a real incubator for bacteria because the apparatus has much finer temperature controls than a drying oven and can be used with humidity. Here is the protocol we used to follow culturing fungi:

Place the inoculated plates upside-down inside of a clean tupperware lined with sterile non-fenestrated pads moistened with sterile H2O (You can purchase these from Henry Schein). This simple setup keeps the humidity around 100% while preventing air contaminants from collecting on the plates during incubation.

For bacteria, you can set parafilmed plates/ broth tubes on the incubator rack at the desired temperature and keep a flask with some dH2O inside to add some humidity.

We never trusted the precision of the incubator set temp, so we would actually deploy temperature-sensitive data loggers (Holohill, I believe) inside of Falcon tubes for the duration of the culture experiment. You can download the data from these loggers and take the mean ambient temperature over the course of the experiment. 

Hope this helps!

Melissa

Yes you can. Adjust temperature and timer according to your test condition.

I used to do this is some research labs.

I don't recommend to use oven for organism incubation, agreeing with the reason mentioned in previous responses.

if you need something cheap you can get an egg incubator for extremely cheap and that is made to keep the right temperature :)

an oven can be used to incubate microbial organisms , if at all there is no other equipment available. organisms grow at different range of temperatures, so one needs to set the temperature of the oven depending on the type of organism need to be cultured though not all microbial organisms can survive in an oven.