If I said petri-dish the majority of people would probably think 'bacteria'. In our lab half of the petri-dishes actually contain plants!

But why bother? We have a greenhouse where we grow plants the 'usual way' on soil, so what's the point of the petri-dish?

Sometime we need to check that our plants have the DNA that we have added to them. Much like with glowing rats, we need to check that our plants glow. It's much easier to do this on petri-dishes than on big pots of soil. We can then pick the plants that do glow and pop them into soil to fully develop. 

What actually makes them glow? It's something called GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) which was first found in jelly fish! Other scientists have used this to create all sorts of different coloured glowing proteins which have been really useful for scientists all over the world. One high profile experiment was the 'Brainbow'. My work is sadly not quite as exciting!