New tests make it easier to control antibiotics

The discovery of antibiotic drugs in the environment can easily be made possible thanks to the portable kit set by a team of scientists from the US Department of Agriculture (ARS), Abraxis, LLC and plus. Czech Republic invented and validated.

The research conducted by the team showed that the kits are called enzyme linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) to detect the exact amount of antibiotic sulfide or longer. "sulfa drugs" in waste water samples, for example, when these antibiotics are excreted in the urine, they may still be in an unchanged environment or into metabolites.

Chemist Weilin Shelver and ARS physiologist Nancy Shappell - both working for the agency's Biological Science Research Laboratory in Fargo, ND - have jointly conducted approved studies. cooperating with equipment manufacturers Milan Franek of Veterinary Research Institute in Brno, Czech Republic; and Fernando Rubio of Abraxis, LLC at Warminster, Pa.

A new kit makes it easier to detect the amount of sulfate antibiotics in field wastewater.(Photo: Abraxis, LLC)

By using antibiotics produced by Franek, Rubio has prepared kits for farmers, wastewater plant operators, researchers and others to conduct the control. Sunfuamide antibiotics in an area. Typically, waste water plant operators can use these kits to determine whether adjustments to their treatment regimens effectively prevent the discharge of antibiotics. into the river way or not. Scientists can use kits to control the destruction and transport of sulfuric antibiotic in soils.

The current kit has detected and measured the level of sulfuric antibiotic in model models. However, narrow space, high operating costs and professional training make these methods impractical for field applications. In contrast, according to Shelver, the kit is easy to use, requires minimal use training and delivers results quickly.

In tests that used water samples from two wastewater treatment plants, as well as samples that Shappell obtained from pig stables, Shelver used solution of chromatography - spectral distribution ( LC-MS: liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry) to verify the accuracy of the kit in the detection of two widely used sunfuamide antibiotics, sulfamethoxazole and sulfamethazine. Shelver believes that this kit is a more flexible complement to the LC-MS-based detection methods and is particularly useful for situations that require conventional environmental control.