Invitrogen launches Legionella test to streamline surveillance

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

Several strains of the legionella bacteria, most notably Legionella pneumophila, can cause sickness and death in humans. An estimated 8,000 to 18,000 people are diagnosed with legionellosis in the US each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Common sources of the bacteria include public water disseminators such as cooling towers, domestic hot-water systems and fountains. In order to prevent outbreaks of the disease, many public institutions such as hospitals perform regular surveillance for the organism.

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 micro-organisms.

“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.

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.