Alex Dajkovic, lead author of the study, said the findings might lead to a new class of antibiotics.

Dajkovic, along with Professor Denis Wirtz, discovered how a belt-like structure called a Z ring, which pinches a rod-shaped bacterium to produce two offspring, can be disabled by a protein called MinC. By exploiting that vulnerability, the researchers said, pharmaceutical companies might find a way to fight infections that no longer respond to older medications.

"The potential medical applications of our discovery are significant," Dajkovic said. "Because the molecules involved in cell division are very similar in almost all bacteria, the process we uncovered provides a new target for the people who make antibiotics. This is extremely important because antibiotic resistance is on the rise, and many preventable deaths -- especially in the developing world -- are caused by bacterial infections."

Dajkovic, who is now a researcher at the Curie Institute in Paris, and Wirtz, who is also associate director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology, report their research in the journal Current Biology.