Hossein Sabourifard; Azim Ghaesmnezhad; Khodayar Hemmati; Aboutaleb Hezarjaribi; Mahmoodreza Bahrami; Fahimeh Nosrati
Abstract
Introduction: One of the most important requirements in planning production and processing of medicinal plants in order to obtain high yield and high-quality is the initial assessment of the physical and chemical properties of soil, which reduces the production cost by avoiding the use of unnecessary ...
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Introduction: One of the most important requirements in planning production and processing of medicinal plants in order to obtain high yield and high-quality is the initial assessment of the physical and chemical properties of soil, which reduces the production cost by avoiding the use of unnecessary soil analysis. Summer savory (Satureja hortensis L.) is one the most widely used medicinal plants that quality index of plant is related to the quantity and the constituent of its essential oil content. Understanding the relations between the quantity and quality of medicinal plants with the very physical and chemical properties of soil is very complex and the estimation of parameters changes of medicinal plants affect by soil quality characteristics is more difficult. Today, with the arrival of multivariable regression models and artificial lattice models in the research, many complex relationships found in nature is understandable. Hence the need for estimation the biomass yield of savory using fast, cheap and with acceptable accuracy is feeling.
Materials and Methods: The present study was performed at the Agricultural Research Station Neyshabur as pot experiment based on a completely randomized design with three replications. Around 53 soil samples were collected from different parts of Neyshabur city, and soil texture, organic matter, pH, salinity, phosphorus, potassium, nitrogen and carbon content were selected as the easily available parameters. Before planting the parameters were measured in laboratory. Approximately 90 days after planting seeds in pots containing soil samples, the sampling of plants was done based on the treatments. For drying, samples were placed for 24 hours in an oven at 40 °C. Finally, the relationship between the biomass yield and easily available soil parameters was determined using artificial neural network by Matlab7.9 software.
Results and Discussion: The results showed that soil variability, is a key element in the management of valuable information on soil properties within a field and valuable information on soil properties within a field nature puts at our disposal. In yield modeling with 10 parameters for 53 soil samples, the best makeup hidden layer with Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm training as a hidden layer, 58 neurons, logsig threshold function for hidden layer and Tansig for the output layer were selected. High values of R2 and low levels of RMSE mentioned the proximity of the forecast data with measurement data and high accuracy of the model in summer savory biomass yield estimation. To obtain the most sensitive parameters, the sensitivity analysis was calculated using no-sensitive coefficient. So that, if the coefficient of a sensitive parameter is more than 1.0, the mentioned parameter, is one of the critical parameters of model. Accordingly, the parameters of organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, organic matter, potassium, pH, salinity, clay, silt and sand respectively were selected as the most sensitive parameters. The addition of input parameters increases the value of R2 and reduces the RMSE during training, validation and test stages. This represents an increasing in the accuracy of model in estimation of biomass yield via increasing the input parameters. Models 1(soil texture) and 2(carbon) are not enough strong for biomass yield estimation. With increasing the experiment from 1 to 2, the potency of the neural network model 3(soil texture + carbon) significantly increased. Thus with an overview, the model No. 3 suggested as an improved model because with the minimum number of imputes produced equal output comparing the models with more inputs.
Conclusions: Based on the obtained results, it seems that with the improvement of artificial neural network models and determining appropriate parameters, results to understanding the soil factors involved in the formation of savory plant biomass and better planning. Till leads to a cheaper and better product. Also, results showed that the artificial neural network has high accuracy in estimating the biomass plant Summer Savory. So that, the 80% of yield variability of the study area, presents by using the data of 10 readily available properties of the soil. Yield biomass of savory, largely depends on the soil texture, organic matter, carbon and the minerals of the soil. Since, this study is the first work to estimate the biomass of medicinal plants using artificial neural network, therefore recommended to use this method to estimate the yield and essential oil of other medicinal plants.
Nastaran Hemmati; Azim Ghasemnezhad; Javad Fattahi Moghadam; Pooneh Ebrahimi
Abstract
Introduction: all fruits that called citrus are from rutaceae family and aurantioideae subfamily. This subfamily have more than 33 different genus that only three of its genus (citrus, poncirus and fortunella) have economic aspects and in citrus producing country are important. It's reported that orange ...
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Introduction: all fruits that called citrus are from rutaceae family and aurantioideae subfamily. This subfamily have more than 33 different genus that only three of its genus (citrus, poncirus and fortunella) have economic aspects and in citrus producing country are important. It's reported that orange skin has a phenolic compounds which play a role in natural defense mechanism. Also various compounds of phenolic and antioxidant have a major role in fruit tolerance to stressful condition suh as cold and drought. Metabolites found in citrus fruits have antioxidant properties and it's very useful in pharmaceutical, food and cosmetics industries. Oranges, like other citrus fruits, are an excellent source of vitamin C; Vitamin C is a powerful natural antioxidant. Consumption of foods rich in vitamin C helps the body develop resistance against infectious agents and scavenge harmful, pro-inflammatory free radicals from the blood. Various factors such as rootstock type can effect on quality and quantity of citrus fruits. Also, the usage of rootstock causes the change in plant characteristics such as flowering time, ripening time, fruit quality and antioxidant characters of the fruits. Other factors except the rootstock such as scion, geographical and climate factors are effective on producing secondary metabolites. Also active substances or secondary metabolites are producing by the conduction of genetic processes, but their production are being effected by other factors obviously. The aim of this study is to investigating the biochemical changes grafted tree fruit that affected by rootstock with study the correlation between grafted tree and rootstock changes.
Materials and Methods: This study was done to compare the amount of total phenol, total flavonoids and antioxidant features of fruit flesh and skin with investigating the effect of cultivar and rootstock on these parameters based on completely randomized factorial design with three replications. For this purpose total phenol, total flavonoid and antioxidant activity in two citrus cultivar (morro and mars) that grafted on four rootstock (yuzu, citrumelo, sour orange and shel mahalleh) with seedling rootstocks fruit were studied in fruit skin and flesh. Fruits were harvested in the middle of December according to their total soluble solid materials (TSS) which was 10 and then transferred to the researching laboratory in Gorgan Agricultural Science and Natural Resources University. Antioxidant properties using DPPH method in 517 nm wavelength, total amount of phenol using folin siocalteu method in 765 nm wavelength and the total amount of flavonoid were done using the aluminum chloride method in 415 nm wavelength and they were measured using spectrophotometer.
Results and Discussion: the result showed that the two factors consisting rootstock and scion have significant effect on the amount of total phenol, total flavonoid and antioxidant properties of extracts of citrus skin and flesh. The greatest amount of phenolic compounds was produced in the skin of morro cultivar that grafted on shel mahalleh rootstock and the lowest amount was observed in the flesh of yuzu seedling rootstock. Total flavonoid was affected by fruit tissue, cultivar and rootstock. The maximum amount of that was seen in the skin of morro and mars cultivar that was grafted on yuzu rootstock and the minimum amount was recorded in the flesh of morro cultivar that grafted on sour orange rootstock. Also the highest antioxidant activity was produced in skin of citrumelo seedling rootstock and the lowest amount was seen in flesh of yuzu seedling rootstock. The investigation on citrus rootstock showed that, antioxidant activity, total phenol and total flavonoid had significant effect in different rootstock and cultivar fruit. These compounds were affected by climatic condition. Because the light is effective in biosynthesis of phenolic compounds, in fact, these substances have a protective role against the light, especially short wavelengths. Therefore their more accumulation is in skin. The results of this experiment and also the results of the other researcher show that the rootstock effect is related to the quality of grafted species with the species, rootstock type and their interaction.
Conclusion: Based on these experiments, there was significant difference between antioxidant compounds of grafted tree fruit with rootstock fruit but there wasn’t a clear relationship between them. It seems this difference was due to combination and physiological characteristic of each fruit. It seems that the accumulation of chemicals in citrus fruit superior than every factors depends on genetic characteristics and inherent abilities. So that some factors specially rootstock has an important and determinant role in accumulation of these substances.
Azam Asefie Najaf Abadi; Khodayar Hemmati; Azim Ghasemnejad; Mina Ghazaeian; Pooneh Ebrahimi
Abstract
Abstract
The harvesting time and storage conditions of olive fruit are effective factors on the quality and quantity of oil. The harvesting time of olive is different in each area and it depends on climatic conditions.This investigation was carried out to assess the impact of harvesting time on olive ...
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Abstract
The harvesting time and storage conditions of olive fruit are effective factors on the quality and quantity of oil. The harvesting time of olive is different in each area and it depends on climatic conditions.This investigation was carried out to assess the impact of harvesting time on olive oil quality and quantity frome two olive varieties cultivated in Gorgan region. For this reason fruits of selected cultivars, Mishen and kroniki, were harvested with fifteen-day intervals from 6 september till middle desember. Then quality and quantity of oil was determined. The results showed that dry matter, oil content (in dry), free fatty acids increased during ripening, whereas peroxide value decreased during ripening. Therefore, the best harvesting time for these cultivars is beginning of December.
Keywords: Olive oil, Harvesting time, Oil quality and Quantity
