Cloning grills: high throughput cloning for structural genomics.

Cloning grills are aluminum grids designed to divide an agar plate into segments, thereby multiplying the number of E. coli cultures which can be streaked out on a single plate. The grills are autoclaved and placed in square petri dishes immediately after hot agar is poured. When the agar solidifies, the grill remains embedded in the media, and each of the 12 lanes accommodates the streaking out of a single culture. As the spacing of the grill lanes is the same as that of a 96-well plate, 12 cultures can be streaked at a time using a 12-channel pipette. This allows a plate of 96 cultures to be rapidly and accurately plated for colony isolation on only eight agar plates.