Innovative cold atmospheric plasma (iCAP) decreases corneal ulcer formation and bacterial loads and improves anterior chamber health in methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus keratitis.

Bacterial keratitis is a vision-threatening infection of the cornea that is typically treated with antibiotics. However, antibiotics sometimes fail to eradicate the infection and do not prevent or repair the damage caused directly by the bacteria or the host immune response to the infection. Our group previously demonstrated that treatment of Pseudomonas aeruginosa keratitis in rabbits with innovative cold atmospheric plasma (iCAP) resulted in reduced edema, ulcer formation, and bacterial load.

Extracellular ammonia at sites of pulmonary infection with Coccidioides posadasii contributes to severity of the respiratory disease.

Coccidioides is the causative agent of a potentially life-threatening respiratory disease of humans. A feature of this mycosis is that pH measurements of the microenvironment of pulmonary abscesses are consistently alkaline due to ammonia production during the parasitic cycle. We previously showed that enzymatically active urease is partly responsible for elevated concentrations of extracellular ammonia at sites of lung infection and contributes to both localized host tissue damage and exacerbation of the respiratory disease in BALB/c mice.

Gene disruption in Coccidioides using hygromycin or phleomycin resistance markers.

The following transformation protocol is based on homologous recombination that occurs between a gene disruption or gene replacement construct and a target gene of Coccidioides. The DNA constructs employed contain either the gene that encodes for hygromycin B or phleomycin resistance, which are present in the pAN7.1 or pAN8.