in the absence of herbicides, cover crops play an important role for weed management in organic than in conventional farming. therefore, in order to evaluate the effects of cover crop management and plant density of buckwheat (fagopyrum esculentum) as cover crop on weed suppression, a field experiment was conducted at the research farm of university of zanjan, during the growing season of 2011....

Plant production systems globally must be optimized to produce stable high yields from limited land under changing and variable climates. Demands for food, animal feed, and feedstocks for bioenergy and biorefining applications, are increasing with population growth, urbanization and affluence. Low-input, sustainable, alternatives to petrochemical-derived fertilizers and pesticides are required ...

the iranian thymus daenensis subsp. daenensis is rich in monoterpene phenols (especially thymol and carvacrol). this research was conducted to isolate and characterize the plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (pgprs) from rhizosphere of t. daenensis. pgprs were screened based on some physiological traits including iaa production, phosphate solubilization, and siderophore compounds production ab...

This work deals with the multicriteria cost-environment design of multiproduct batch plants, where the design variables are the equipment item sizes as well as the operating conditions. The case study is a multiproduct batch plant for the production of four recombinant proteins. Given the important combinatorial aspect of the problem, the approach used consists in coupling a stochastic algorith...

the use of healthy planting material is an important prerequisite for controlling destructive viral diseases in potato production. virus elimination methods such as meristem culture and thermotherapy are usually used to produce the nucleus stock of healthy planting material. here, we report a new technique of electrotherapy for elimination of two potyviruses, potato virus a (pva), and potato vi...

Current study was set up to determine the response of 12 Iranian winter diploid barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) cultivars to anther culture on solid FHG induction medium supplemented with 90 mg/l sucrose, 2 mg/l 2,4-D and 0.1 mg/l kinetin. For cold pretreatment each selected spike was kept in a refrigerator at 4 C for 14 days. The experimental design consisted of a completely randomized design (CRD...

Nutrient availability and herbivory can regulate primary production in ecosystems, but little is known about how, or whether, they may interact with one another. Here, we investigate how nitrogen availability and insect herbivory interact to alter aboveground and belowground plant community biomass in an old-Weld ecosystem. In 2004, we established 36 experimental plots in which we manipulated s...

The synthesis of plant-wide control structures is recognised as one of the most important production-management design problems in the process industries. This article proposes a closed-loop control structure utilising production performance indicators (pPIs) as a possible solution to simplify this problem. pPIs represent the translation of operating objectives, such as the minimisation of prod...