Cell culture plates are an essential tool for cell biology research. They are used to grow cells in a controlled environment, which allows for study of the effects of different conditions on cell growth and development. The plates are typically made of plastic or glass and may have one or more wells, each of which can hold a small amount of cell culture media. The media provides the cells with the nutrients the cells need to grow and divide. Cell culture plates may be used in incubators to grow cells in a controlled environment as well as in glove boxes. The incubator provides the cells with the necessary conditions for growth, including a constant temperature, humidity, and atmosphere.Conventional cell culture plates are susceptible to evaporation, which causes increased osmolarity of cell culture media. This in turn causes unnatural growth of cells and well-to-well variability due to uneven evaporation. In addition, evaporation causes increased concentration of the salts involved in electrical signaling of electrically active cell types, changing the ionic gradients across the cell membrane, and affecting all characteristics of the initiation, transmission (and computation) in electrically active cells such as cardiac or neuronal cells. It is also difficult to maintain desired dissolved gas concentration with standard cell culture plates. This generally requires use of a compressed gas system, which uses gas regulators, sensors that are expensive and have limited lifetimes, and feedback control as well as a glove box for culture and/or handling.An incubator is used to maintain the desired temperature of the cell culture plates. The incubator impedes access to the cultures for feeding, for microscopy, etc. Furthermore, observation equipment for use inside an incubator needs to be designed to resist incubator conditions (e.g., body temperature heat and humidity). Incubators also take up significant space and packing of incubators in a laboratory is space-inefficient relative to the form factor of the cell culture plates. As the number of cell culture plates in a single incubator increases, the ability of the incubator to perform its function decreases, since there is a minimum number of times an incubator may be accessed per week per cell culture vessel. However, every time the incubator is accessed, it is unable to perform its functions for a prolonged period of time, e.g., over 30 minutes. Another technical problem is that cell culture devices that use an air gap for gas exchange have an increased risk of microbial contamination via that air gap. This makes it difficult to perform manual cell culture experiments over the course of months without contamination. In addition, cross-contamination is more likely if multiple different experiments are being performed in the same laboratory. Thus, there is a need for cell culture vessels and systems that overcome these problems.