The Water Industry Achievements Awards are one of the most prestigious awards in the Water industry, with the 2015 event being held on Tuesday 21^st April at the Hilton Metropole, Birmingham. The awards recognise excellence across the industry and reward organisations that have achieved outstanding performance in 2014.

ALS Environmental have been shortlisted for a WIA Award for the development, accreditation, validation and implementation of the MALDI-ToF confirmation. The nomination of our revolutionary confirmation approach comes under the Most Innovative New Technology of the Year section.

Click here to see the full list of Finalists

The MALDI-ToF confirmation approach allows ALS Environmental to remove the presumptive stage from all Microbiological confirmations. We are the first UK environmental analytical laboratory to both UKAS ISO 17025:2005 and Drinking Water Testing Specification (DWTS) accredit and implement this technology. 

With a Microbiological library that has over 15,000 different species of individual bacteria, including nearly 200 different strains of Legionella; the additional information that is offered by MALDI-ToF confirmations, when coupled with the time savings for instant confirmations (see Table 1) make this development truly revolutionary:

Table 1: MALDI-ToF vs. Standard Confirmation Times

The MALDI-ToF has been used by ALS Environmental for all Legionella confirmations since January 2014 and all microbial confirmations since March 2014. The benefits of the MALDI-ToF allowed ALS to develop a specialist ESKAPES pathogens suite for Healthcare customers and we are always looking to add bacteria to our library to help meet customer requirements.

Nick Barsby, Sales & Marketing Manager at ALS Environmental, comments:

Having the hard work we have undertaken on the MALDI-ToF confirmation approach recognised by the industry is a real honour. We have some very strong competition in our category and to be selected as a finalist is an achievement in itself.

If you have any questions on MALDI-ToF confirmations or would like to request a quotation please contact your Customer Service Co-ordinator or contact us on 02476 42 12 13.