High densities of Dehalococcoides mccartyi to the selective enrichment protocol. In our study, these rates and densities were independent of the origin of the microbial inocula and the end-product of reductive dechlorination in microcosms, which bring about implications for potentially improving bioremediation in chlorinated ethene-contaminated environments. Molecular marker technology has greatly accelerated gene/trait tagging, thereby improving development of elite variety through marker-assisted selection in breeding programs. Valuable genetic and genomic TWS119 resources useful for molecular marker development in wheat are publicly available, and a total of 1,286,372 wheat expressed sequence tags have been deposited in the NCBI database. More than 16,000 ESTs have been mapped in the wheat deletion bins collection. These resources provide opportunities for development of functional molecular markers, and performing comparative genomics analyses. Simple sequence repeat and STS markers developed from ESTs are often associated with the coding regions of the genome and can be converted into easy and reliable PCR-based markers useful for trait mapping and marker assisted selection. Although the complete genome sequence of wheat is not expected to be available in the near future due to the complexity and huge genome size, a large amount of wheat sequences have been generated to provide genome-wide sequence information for marker development. In addition, the gene order in grass species was generally conserved and the synteny facilitates comparative genomics analyses in grass families. The availability of genome sequence information from rice, Brachypodium, and Sorghum allows for improved comparisons and predictions of gene conservation in other genomes like wheat. The assumption is that if the gene order within a defined region is conserved across these three species, the corresponding genomic region in wheat might have maintained similar gene conservation during evolution. These predictions enabled colinearity or synteny analyses, which served as a primary source of genome information for wheat marker development and mapping. In this paper, we report the identification of a powdery mildew resistance gene MlIW172 derived from wild emmer and mapping the gene to chromosome arm 7AL. We have also developed a high-resolution genetic linkage map with alignment to a draft physical map covering the MlIW172 region by using a combinational approach of comparative and genetic analysis, and BAC screening and sequencing. Allergic asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the bronchial airways characterized by infiltrating of a variety of inflammatory cells, including eosinophils, mast cells, T-lymphocytes, neutrophils, and macrophages among others. In recent years, the incidence and severity of atopic disorders has steadily increased in developed countries. It has been reported that allergic asthma is tightly associated with imbalance of Th1/Th2 cells and their characteristic cytokine profiles. Th2 cell responses initiate and predominate in atopic disorders through releasing of Th2 cytokines, mainly IL-4, IL-5 and IL-13, which elevate the serum immunoglobulin E and recruit eosinophils.