Affinitymagnetic separation (AMS) is a laboratory tool that can efficiently isolate bacteria

Bacteria

Bacteria are a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals...

l cells out of body fluid or cultured cells. It can also be used as a method of quantifying the pathogenicity

Pathogenicity

Pathogenicity is the ability of a pathogen to produce an infectious disease in an organism.It is often used interchangeably with the term "virulence", although virulence is used more specifically to describe the relative degree of damage done by a pathogen, or the degree of pathogenicity caused by...

 of food, blood or feces. Another laboratory separation tool is the immunomagnetic separation

Immunomagnetic separation

Immunomagnetic separation is a laboratory tool that can efficiently isolate cells out of body fluid or cultured cells. It can also be used as a method of quantifying the pathogenicity of food, blood or feces. DNA analysis have supported the combined use of both this technique and Polymerase Chain...

 (IMS), which is more suitable for the isolation of eucaryotic cells.

Technique

Host recognition of bacteriophages occur via bacteria-binding proteins that have strong binding affinities to specific protein or carbohydrate structures on the surface of the bacterial host. Bacteria-binding proteins derived from bacteriophage

Bacteriophage

A bacteriophage is any one of a number of viruses that infect bacteria. They do this by injecting genetic material, which they carry enclosed in an outer protein capsid...

 coating paramagnetic

Paramagnetism

Paramagnetism is a form of magnetism whereby the paramagnetic material is only attracted when in the presence of an externally applied magnetic field. In contrast with this, diamagnetic materials are repulsive when placed in a magnetic field...

 beads will bind to specific cell components present on the surface of host thus capturing the cells and facilitate the concentration of these bead-attached cells. The concentration process is created by a magnet placed on the side of the test tube bringing the beads to it. Due to the phage-ligand technology

Phage-ligand technology

The Phage-ligand technology is a technology to detect, bind and remove bacteria and bacterial toxins by using highly specific bacteriophage derived proteins.-Origins:...

, AMS is superior to the antibody based immunomagnetic separation (IMS) on sorting bacterial cells.