Means of phage growth and enumeration that involves both phage and bacterial application to the surface of an agar slab as found within a Petri dish.
Direct plating generally contrasts with soft-agar overlay or, indeed, simply the pour plate methods as has occasionally also been used. For review of direct plating as a method, see Mazzocco et al. (2009).
The direct-plating plaquing method is the original means by which by which phage plaques were grown but was subsequently replaced in most but not all labs and systems by the soft agar overlay method which, if nothing else, allows for phage diffusion within lower density agar media (i.e., semisolid rather than solid) and also allows for potentially more consistently or easily achieved bacterial lawn homogeneity.
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