Publications by authors named "Philip Lauman"

Agricultural crop yield losses and food destruction due to infections by phytopathogenic bacteria such as , which causes devastating diseases in onion, mushroom, corn, and rice crops, pose major threats to worldwide food security and cause enormous damage to the global economy. Biocontrol using bacteriophages has emerged as a promising strategy against a number of phytopathogenic species but has never been attempted against due to a lack of quantitative infection models and a scarcity of phages targeting this specific pathogen. In this study, we present a novel, procedurally straightforward, and highly generalizable fully quantitative maceration model and an accompanying quantitative metric, the maceration index (PMI).

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Antimicrobial resistance is a danger to global public health and threatens many aspects of modern medicine. Bacterial species such as those of the Burkholderia cepacia complex (Bcc) cause life-threatening respiratory infections and are highly resistant to antibiotics. One promising alternative being explored to combat Bcc infections is phage therapy (PT): the use of phages to treat bacterial infections.

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The increasing prevalence and worldwide distribution of multidrug-resistant bacterial pathogens is an imminent danger to public health and threatens virtually all aspects of modern medicine. Particularly concerning, yet insufficiently addressed, are the members of the complex (Bcc), a group of at least twenty opportunistic, hospital-transmitted, and notoriously drug-resistant species, which infect and cause morbidity in patients who are immunocompromised and those afflicted with chronic illnesses, including cystic fibrosis (CF) and chronic granulomatous disease (CGD). One potential solution to the antimicrobial resistance crisis is phage therapy-the use of phages for the treatment of bacterial infections.

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