It's a warning issued repeatedly to doctors, hospitals and the agricultural industry — that overuse of antibiotics is producing resistant strains of bacteria.

Now, a research paper is advising scientists to cut down on the use of antibiotics in lab experiments to stem resistance and maintain the efficacy of antibiotics currently in use.

Prof. Laura Bowater, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, highlighted the problem in an article published Friday in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

Using antibiotics in research has transformed scientific discovery, including advances in genetic research, such as the Human Genome Project, Bowater said.

However, the antibiotics used in the laboratory such as ampicillin, chloramphenicol and tetracycline often "overlap with antibiotics used in the clinic," she wrote. "And antibiotic resistance genes can effectively provide a pool of bacterial resistance toward a range of different antibiotics."

She said molecular biologists are cloning antibiotic resistance markers into DNA molecules with multiple origins of replication, which raises additional concerns about their containment.

"Reliance on antibiotic-based technologies is not acceptable, necessary or responsible. In this day and age we need to consider other synthetic options and technologies that avoid the use of clinically important antibiotics.

"At the very least, researchers must be encouraged to use antibiotics more responsibly and sparingly in both educational and research settings," Bowater added.