The Comprehensive Phytopathogen Genomics Resource: a web-based resource for data-mining plant pathogen genomes

The Comprehensive Phytopathogen Genomics Resource (CPGR) provides a web-based portal for plant pathologists and diagnosticians to view the genome and trancriptome sequence status of 806 bacterial, fungal, oomycete, nematode, viral and viroid plant pathogens. Tools are available to search and analyze annotated genome sequences of 74 bacterial, fungal and oomycete pathogens. Oomycete and fungal genomes are obtained directly from GenBank, whereas bacterial genome sequences are downloaded from the A Systematic Annotation Package (ASAP) database that provides curation of genomes using comparative approaches. Curated lists of bacterial genes relevant to pathogenicity and avirulence are also provided. The Plant Pathogen Transcript Assemblies Database provides annotated assemblies of the transcribed regions of 82 eukaryotic genomes from publicly available single pass Expressed Sequence Tags. Data-mining tools are provided along with tools to create candidate diagnostic markers, an emerging use for genomic sequence data in plant pathology. The Plant Pathogen Ribosomal DNA (rDNA) database is a resource for pathogens that lack genome or transcriptome data sets and contains 131 755 rDNA sequences from GenBank for 17 613 species identified as plant pathogens and related genera

Process Configurations for the production of the 2-methoxy-2,4,4-trimethylpentane : a novel gasoline oxygenate

A comparison of various process configurations was made for the production of 2-methoxy-2,4,4-trimetylpentane which is a promising gasoline component owing low solubility to water and high octane value. The ether is synthesised by reacting methanol with a mixture of 2,4,4-trimethyl-1-pentene and 2,4,4-trimethyl-2-pentene, which are obtained in a large scalefrom the dimerisation of isobutene. The reaction equilibria were determined experimentally at temperature range 323- 383 K in liquid phase using a commercial cation exchange resin Amberlyst 35 as catalyst. A first order kinetic model was developed and utilised in the process simulations. The production of the ether was found to inefficient in a once throug tubular reactor, because the conversion is stronly limited by the reaction equilibrium. Reactive distillation increases the conversion considerably