Biotech Updates

Phytopath, a New Pathogen Resource

January 13, 2012

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council recently launched a new resource base called Phytopath to assist researchers in understanding the origins of crop diseases and finding ways to control agricultural pathogens. The resource base "integrates genome-scale data of important plant pathogen species with literature curated information about the phenotypes of host pathogen," the news release said.

PhytoPath is geared to help researchers utilize the vast quantities of data produced in sequencing experiments, gene expression and sequence variation, by integrating them with curated information about infectious phenotypes. PhytoPath also provides several analysis tools to help researchers compare predicted gene repertoires of pathogens with similar (or dissimilar) lifestyles.

The Phytopath website can be accessed at http://www.phytopathdb.org/. News can be viewed at http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/research-technologies/2012/120110-pr-new-pathogen-resource.aspx