Rice environmental engineers have discovered a way to stop a particular strain of bacteria from passing on a drug-resistant DNA element to subsequent generations. The discovery has implications for other bacteria that threaten public health due to the development of resistance to antibiotics.

Pedro Alvarez and his team found that by limiting Pseudomonas aeruginosa's access to food and oxygen, the microorganism conserved energy rather than using it to pass on plasmid, a small and transmissible DNA element used to resist antibiotics, to future generations.

"The propagation of antibiotic resistance has been perceived as a medical or microbiology-related problem," Alvarez said in a press release. "And it truly is a serious problem. But what many people miss is that it is also an environmental pollution problem. A lot of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria originate in animal agriculture, where there is overuse, misuse and abuse of antibiotics."

Alvarez says confined animal feeding operations, found in agricultural situations where animals are kept and raised in confined situations, are often the source of environmental contamination by antibiotics and the antibiotic-resistant genes that soak in the ground, water and food supply.

One practical application of his team's discovery would be to set up a barrier of mulch in the channels that drain waste from these types of agricultural environments. The mulch would serve as a barrier to these types of antibiotic genes that would starve them of food and oxygen.

The researchers' results were reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology.