The project will develop tools and establish protocols using prototype viruses and standard diagnostic methods available and running in the different partner labs of the consortium. Subsequently, different types of viruses, including enveloped and envelope-free, small and large, DNA and RNA viruses of public health importance will be tested. Furthermore, methods for sample preparation will be established for different types of specimen, saliva, plasma, serum, urine and faeces as well as various environmental samples will be used to evaluate the newly established protocol(s). Molecular detection will be performed by real-time RT-PCR or Mini-Array techniques either derived from published protocols or developed or optimized during this study. It will be particularly interesting, to develop diagnostic methods that can be correlated to clinical symptoms allowing symptom-specific analysis. For example, sample from a patient with respiratory symptoms saliva of nasal swabs could be pre-treated with ApoH for elimination of inhibitors and pathogen concentration in order to allow subsequent successful screening for all relevant respiratory pathogens by multiplex PCR and detection using a suitable mini-array. Based on ApoH pre-treatment of clinical and environmental samples new tools and protocols are being established that allow improving of the sensitivity of different techniques for diagnosis and that will allow to add these pre-treatment as an independent step to existing protocols.