Thanks to the proliferation of cell phones with enhanced features over the past decade or so, many of us take having a camera on us at all times for granted. Now, more than ever, we’re able to document the most ridiculous moments of our lives and the silly things we discover without the cost-prohibitive nature of expensive camera film. We have the benefit, too, of knowing if our finger was blocking the lens during the snapping of that priceless shot immediately, and have a better chance of doing it over before the moment — and the opportunity — is forever lost. Also, we don’t have to take completed rolls in to the local drug store to be developed, where the blank-eyed teenager behind the counter and his friends can gawk at our photos before we come in to pick them up.

But the ease of digital photography in the 21st century doesn’t just serve the needs of the casual snapshooter. Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have updated another bit of old school technology with the help of the tiny-chipped cell phone camera: the petri dish. Now, thanks to their efforts, the petri dish has transcended its 19th century roots to incorporate digital photography and offer a more effective way of observing cell growth in the lab. In effect, it’s a smart petri dish, and the engineers — adopting the nomenclature of the day — have named it ePetri.

Says study lead Guoan Zheng: “Our ePetri dish is a compact, small, lens-free microscopy imaging platform. We can directly track the cell culture or bacteria culture within the incubator. The data from the ePetri dish automatically transfers to a computer outside the incubator by a cable connection. Therefore, this technology can significantly streamline and improve cell culture experiments by cutting down on human labor and contamination risks.”

And with all of the high-tech resources at their disposal, what did the engineers use to construct ePetri?

• A Google smart phone
• A commercially available cell phone image sensor
• LEGO building blocks (!)

Co-researcher Michael Elowitz elaborates on ePetri’s elegance of purpose behind its frugal design. “It radically reconceives the whole idea of what a light microscope is. Instead of a large, heavy instrument full of delicate lenses, [the team has] invented a compact lightweight microscope with no lens at all, yet one that can still produce high-resolution images of living cells. Not only that, it can do so dynamically, following events over time in live cells, and across a wide range of spatial scales from the subcellular to the macroscopic.”

ePetri’s projected uses are many, including as an on-the-fly desktop microscope at a doctor’s office that could alleviate the time-consuming need to send cultures away to a lab; it could also serve as part of a portable lab. Immediately, its application in the field of medical diagnosis is an easy fit, but other potential uses include drug screening and toxic compound detection.

A few parting words of caution, though. As with most cutting edge technology, in the wrong hands, it could be deadly.