Evaluation of Agricultural Characteristics and Yield of Different Populations of Dragon's Head (Lallemantia iberica Fisch. et Mey) Collected from Different Regions of Iran

Introduction The great importance of identifying, studying, evaluating, and protecting native ecotypes of medicinal plants as human heritage, collecting agricultural medicinal plants and ecological evaluation of their native ecotypes, and introducing their compatible ecotypes is a necessity for farmers. Considering the few studies in the field of the agricultural role of non-native plants such as Dragon's head in Iran to meet the country's nutritional needs, the present research aims to study and evaluate the performance of local medicinal and multi-purpose plant stands of urban sycamore and also to obtain new scientific materials in the case of these local masses has been done in the research farm of University of Tabriz Faculty of Agriculture. It is necessary to explain that in recent years, due to the crisis of water shortage and drought, this plant is in line with changing the cultivation pattern of the region from plants with high water requirement to plants with low water requirement or dry land has been added to the official cultivation pattern of East Azerbaijan province and is being promoted among the farmers of the region.Materials and Methods To evaluate and investigate the agronomic characteristics and performance of 49 selected Dragon’s head stands from different regions of the country, an experiment was carried out in the form of a simple 7*7 square lattice design with three replications. A field experiment was carried out at the research station of the Faculty of Agriculture of University of Tabriz, located in building number 2 of the Faculty of Agriculture in Basmanj. According to meteorological maps, the climate of this region is among the steppe and semi-arid climates of the world. In this area, although rain sometimes occurs in the summer season, it generally has a dry season in the summer. The area is located at an altitude of 1360 meters above sea level, with a latitude of 38 degrees and five minutes north and a longitude of 46 degrees and 17 minutes east, and its annual rainfall is 285 millimeters. The average annual temperature is 10 degrees Celsius, the average annual maximum temperature is 16.6 degrees Celsius, and the average annual minimum temperature is 4.2 degrees Celsius.Results and DiscussionIn the comparison of the average traits, the best ecotypes in terms of yield were the ecotypes of Kolvang local population 10 and 15, Tabriz local population 3 and 4 and Ahar local population 1 respectively, simple correlation analysis, stepwise regression, and causality showed that biomass traits, number of seeds per plant, number of seeds in capsule and weight of 1000 seeds are the most important factors affecting the increase of seed yield. By analyzing it into components, the first four components explained 80.44% of the changes related to primary traits. Ecotypes Kolvang 10, Tabriz 3, and number Tabriz 4 yield 1661, 1464, and 1404 kg ha-1 respectively, and 3848, 4119, and 3848 kg ha-1 respectively. They produced 4581 kg ha-1 of biomass and were superior in most traits related to economic performance.ConclusionTaking into account the crisis of Lake Urmia and the lack of water in most regions, especially the Azerbaijan region, the medicinal plant Dragon’s head is one of the few plants that can be placed in the spring cycle in most areas of rainfed and irrigated cultivation and in improving the water balance. Lake Urmia and agriculture in the region can play a positive role. Therefore, the ecotypes of Tabriz native population 3, Kolvanagh native population 10, and Tabriz native population 4, which had more grain yield and were superior in most of the traits related to yield, can be considered the most suitable ecotypes of Dragon’s head for use in water conditions and the air of the region advised the farmers for the next crops.AcknowledgementsWe are grateful to all the colleagues located in the Agricultural Research Station of the Faculty of Agriculture

Identification and Classification of Conserved RNA Secondary Structures in the Human Genome

The discoveries of microRNAs and riboswitches, among others, have shown functional RNAs to be biologically more important and genomically more prevalent than previously anticipated. We have developed a general comparative genomics method based on phylogenetic stochastic context-free grammars for identifying functional RNAs encoded in the human genome and used it to survey an eight-way genome-wide alignment of the human, chimpanzee, mouse, rat, dog, chicken, zebra-fish, and puffer-fish genomes for deeply conserved functional RNAs. At a loose threshold for acceptance, this search resulted in a set of 48,479 candidate RNA structures. This screen finds a large number of known functional RNAs, including 195 miRNAs, 62 histone 3′UTR stem loops, and various types of known genetic recoding elements. Among the highest-scoring new predictions are 169 new miRNA candidates, as well as new candidate selenocysteine insertion sites, RNA editing hairpins, RNAs involved in transcript auto regulation, and many folds that form singletons or small functional RNA families of completely unknown function. While the rate of false positives in the overall set is difficult to estimate and is likely to be substantial, the results nevertheless provide evidence for many new human functional RNAs and present specific predictions to facilitate their further characterization

Experimental Study on Damage Identification in GFRP-Strengthened RC Beams Using Novel Cubic Energy-Based Damage Index

In this article, based on a series of laboratory experiments, a new cubic energy-based damage index is introduced for identifying damage locations using acceleration measurements of strengthen-free and GFRP-strengthened reinforced concrete beams having different boundary conditions. For this purpose, wavelet-packet energy has been chosen as feature. Furthermore, a new damage localizing parameter is introduced to estimate damage location using proposed damage index data. In the framework of the laboratory results, potential damages could be detected and located correctly using introduced damage index and the results would be compared with some reference-based indexes. The proposed damage index would have minimum estimation error as compared with other indexes in the literature. Damaged beams are then strengthened with GFRP and the strengthening quality is evaluated using degree-of-strengthening index by comparing signals measured from strengthened and healthy beams. </jats:p

Clinical Outcome Assessment of Medial Femoral Tunnel Placement in Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction

Introduction: Purpose of this study was to evaluate outcome of Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) reconstruction surgery with a medial tibia tunnel entrance in patients with rupture of the ligament. Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed in patients admitted to Sina Hospital in Tehran from April 2009 to April 2011. ACL reconstruction was done by arthroscopic surgery and the patients were assessed six months after surgery. International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) as a standard questionnaire and arthrometer (model KT-1000) were used to measure patients' activity level and functional testing of the device, respectively. Final knee score was given to the patient based on the lowest score in each section which was presented in four groups: A, B, C and D. Results: one hundred seven patients with mean age of 29.61 ± 5.15 years (21-38 years) enrolled in this study among which 84 (78.5%) were males. Most common causes of knee trauma were sport (54.20%), road traffic accidents (19.62%), daily activities (16.82%) and work activity (9.3%). The mean femoral channel length was 44.75 ± 3.41mm. The mean of ROM of Knee after surgery was 143.21 ± 5.37 (133-150). The functional test was performed using an arthrometer and differences between two knees displacement were calculated six months after surgery which revealed that the difference between males and females was significant (p=0.03). Conclusion: The results showed the transtibial graft position is closer to the anatomical position in medial femoral tunnel placement

The Response of Chickpea Cultivars to Field Water Deficit

An experiment was carried out in 2006 to investigate the effects of different irrigation regimes (I1, I2, I3 and I4 for irrigation after 80, 110, 140 and 170 mm evaporation from class A pan, respectively) on ground cover, yield and yield components of four chickpea cultivars (Arman, ILC and Jam from kabuli type and Pirooz from desi type) in the field. In most stages of crop growth and development, the ground cover of ILC under different irrigation regimes was higher than that of the other cultivars. The ground cover of all chickpea cultivars was reduced, as water deficit severity increased. Grain yield and yield components were significantly affected by irrigation regimes. Mean grains per plant, 1000 grain weight and grain yield per unit area for I4 were significantly lower than those for other irrigation regimes, but these traits did not differ significantly among I1, I2 and I3. Thus, irrigation after 140 mm evaporation from class A pan could be a suitable irrigation regime for chickpea cultivars, when water resources are limited. Grains per plant did not differ significantly among chickpea cultivars. In comparison, the largest and the smallest grains were obtained from ILC and Pirooz, respectively. In general, mean 1000 grain weight of kabuli type cultivars was higher than that of desi type cultivar. The superiority of ILC in ground cover and 1000 grain weight resulted in higher grain yield, compared to other cultivars. However, no significant differences in grain yield of Arman, Jam and Pirooz were observed. Interaction of cultivar x irrigation for ground cover, grain weight and grain yield per unit area was not significant, indicating that ILC was a superior cultivar under both well and limited irrigation conditions

Efficient Neural Network Encoding for 3D Color Lookup Tables

3D color lookup tables (LUTs) enable precise color manipulation by mapping input RGB values to specific output RGB values. 3D LUTs are instrumental in various applications, including video editing, in-camera processing, photographic filters, computer graphics, and color processing for displays. While an individual LUT does not incur a high memory overhead, software and devices may need to store dozens to hundreds of LUTs that can take over 100 MB. This work aims to develop a neural network architecture that can encode hundreds of LUTs in a single compact representation. To this end, we propose a model with a memory footprint of less than 0.25 MB that can reconstruct 512 LUTs with only minor color distortion (ΔE ≤ 2.0 on average) over the entire color gamut. We also show that our network can weight colors to provide further quality gains on natural image colors (ΔE ≤ 1.0 on average). Finally, we show that minor modifications to the network architecture enable a bijective encoding that produces LUTs that are invertible, allowing for reverse color processing