The traditional confirmation approach for Legionella is to use a latex agglutination kit to confirm if a postive sample contains Legionella bacteria as either Legionella pneumophila or one of a range of Legionella species. One of the three test reagents was previously only able to detect Legionella pneumophila serogroups 2–14, but following clinical and environmental evaluations this has now been extended to include Legionella pneumophila serogroup 15.

ALS Environmental utilise the MALDI-ToF confirmation approach, which offers instant confirmation of positive samples, and following comparison trials we can increase the scope of our Legionella pneumophila identification. The identification of Legionella pneumophila serogroups 2-14 will be replaced with Legionella pneumophila serogroups 2-15 on all future job reports. This change is also is reflected in our updated UKAS schedule.

The standard agglutination confirmation approach contains three test reagents, each consisting of blue latex particles sensitised with specific rabbit antibodies, which will agglutinate in the presence of specific Legionella cell wall antigens to form visible clumps. This provides a fast and simple screening procedure for Legionella species and serotypes. The test allows a separate identification of Legionella pneumophila serogroup 1, Legionella pneumophila serogroups 2–15 and detection of seven other Legionella species that have been implicated in human disease:

• Legionella longbeachae 1 and 2
• Legionella bozemanii 1 and 2
• Legionella dumoffii
• Legionella gormanii
• Legionella jordanis
• Legionella micdadei
• Legionella anisa

The MALDI-ToF confirmation approach utilised by ALS Environmental is able to identify over 55 different species of Legionella opposed to the 7 offered by the traditional agglutination approach. The additional speciation is offered at no additional charge and falls within our UKAS ISO 17025:2005 accreditation scope.

For the full World Health Organistion list of Legionella Species please click here.

ALS Environmental, who are members of the Legionella Control Association,  offer the MALDI-ToF confirmation technique for all of our microbiological confirmations which enables us to uniquely offer both UKAS and DWTS accredited confirmations almost instantly:

For any questions or queries on our Legionella & Microbiology analysis methods, including information on MALDI-ToF Confirmations, PCR analysis and ESKAPE pathogens, please contact your Customer Service Co-ordinator or call the laboratory on 02476 42 12 13.