Magnetic bead based purification protocols have been developed for many different pathogens. Most of these involve direct capture of the pathogen using beads coated with pathogen-specific antibodies. This method, known as immunomagnetic separation (IMS), has been successfully used to purify and concentrate viruses [17] , bacteria [18, 19] and fungal [20] pathogens. Similarly, methods have been developed which use oligonucleotides to magnetically purify pathogen genomic DNA [21] .