Invitrogen Corporation now have available Dynabeads® MAX Legionella, which enables a unique process for targeting and concentrating legionella from environmental water samples.

The Dynabeads® MAX Legionella provides a rapid and highly reliable sample preparation process, improving the method used, and result achieved, for the detection and quantification of legionella.

Typical procedures for legionella surveillance involve complicated filtration and subsequent culture steps. The filters collect large quantities of other organisms that grow in culture along with legionella, requiring subsequent re-culturing of suspected legionella bacteria. In addition, many of the contaminating organisms can inhibit the growth of the legionella bacteria and produce false negatives. The Dynabeads® MAX Legionella uses magnetic Dynabeads® with antibodies that attach to legionella and selectively isolate and concentrate the bacterium from the sample, eliminating contaminating microorganisms.

'By quickly and reliably isolating only the legionella organism, Dynabeads MAX Legionella streamlines the procedures for legionella surveillance and has the potential to change the market,' said Jim Janicki, Vice President of Invitrogen's Applied Markets. 'Invitrogen's technologies are quickly becoming indispensable for many applications that are essential to preserving public health.'

In addition to the legionella test kit, Invitrogen offers similar Dynabead®-based systems - better known as immunomagnetic separation (IMS) - to isolate pathogenic organisms such as E. coli O157:H7, salmonella, listeria, cryptosporidium and giardia from complex samples.