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Introduction: Medicinal plants are precious resources in Iran's broad landscape of natural resources, which can play an essential role in health, employment, and non-petroleum export if recognized, cultivated, developed, and exploited scientifically and correctly. Given the limitation of water resources in Iran, the agricultural sector's use of unconventional water resources has been proposed as a solution. One of these methods is to pass water through a magnetic field before irrigation to improve water productivity. The soil health management is crucial for ensuring ecological and agricultural productions and maintaining plant diversity. The negative impacts of chemical fertilizers forced the agrochemical companies to replace them with Nano-fertilizers in sustainable agricultural systems in order to achieve desirable crop productivity. Materials and methods: With the aim of investigating the effect of foliar application of different nano fertilizers on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of peppermint under different irrigation conditions, an experimental experiment was carried out in an agricultural field in Miandoab city in West Azarbaijan province. The experiment was in the form of split plots based on randomized complete block design in three replications. The main plot was assigned to the irrigation cycle (every 5, 7 and 10 days) and the secondary plot was assigned to foliar spraying treatments (control (no foliar spraying) nano NPK, nano Fe, nano Zn and nano Mn). chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, carotenoid, plant height, number of leaves per plant, leaf weight, fresh yield, dry yield, proline content, essential oil percentage and essential oil yield was measured. Results and discussion: Based on the results of data variance analysis, all investigated traits were affected by irrigation, foliar application and the interaction of two treatments at the 1% probability level. The interaction of year with foliar application on dry and wet yield of fodder was significant at the probability level of 1%. The triple interaction of year x irrigationx foliar application and was significant only on proline content at the 1% probability level. The results of the mean comparison of irrigation with foliar application interaction treatments showed the Foliar application of nano Fe under irrigation conditions once every 5 days had the highest content of chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b and carotenoids (respectively with an average of 13.43, 3.61 and 4.12 mg g fresh weight-1), plant height (33.92 cm), leaf fresh weight (6.71 g), aerial fresh yield (13121 kg ha-1), aerial dry yield (4600.1 kg ha-1) and the lowest proline content (6.32 mmol g weight-1). Also, the highest percentage of essential oil (0.67%) was attributed to nano Fe foliar spraying under irrigation conditions of 7 days once. In this study, although the highest essential oil yield (24.74 kg ha-1) was assigned to the application of nano Zn under the irrigation once every 5 days' condition but there was no significant difference between the mentioned treatment and Foliar application nano NPK and nano-Fe in the irrigation treatment of 7 days' treatments. Conclusion: It can be stated that the use of NPK and Fe in the form of nanoparticles under mild water stress conditions can improve the economic performance of the product and save water consumption. Also, foliar spraying of this fertilizer it was able to significantly increase the essential oil yield of in this plant under severe water stress conditions. Therefore, foliar spraying of nutritional elements in nano form can be a solution to improve the essential oil yield in peppermint plants under water stress conditions with different intensities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We extend the study of Chebyshev centers in pre-Hilbert C*-modules by considering the C*-algebra valued map defined by ∣x∣ = ‹x, xi1›1/2. We prove that if T is a remotal subset of a preHilbert C*-module M, and F ⊆ M is star-shaped at a relative Chebyshev center c of T with respect to F, then ∣x - qT (x)² ≥ ∣x-c∣2 +∣c-qT (c)∣²(x ∈ F). The uniqueness of Chebyshev center follows from this inequality. This is a generalization of a well-known result on Hilbert spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the farthest point mapping in a p-normed space X in virtue of subdifferential of r(x) = sup{∥x - z∥p : z ϵ M}, where M is a weakly sequentially compact subset of X. We show that the set of all points in X which have farthest point in M contains a dense Gδ subset of X. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Klebsiella pneumoniae is a common cause of nosocomial infections. Antibiotic resistance and ability to form biofilm, as two key virulence factors of K. pneumoniae, are involved in the persistence of infections. The purpose of this study was to investigate the correlation between antimicrobial resistance and biofilm formation capability among K. pneumoniae strains isolated from hospitalized patients in Iran., Methods: Over a 10-month period, a total of 100 non-duplicate K. pneumoniae strains were collected. Antibiotic susceptibility was determined by Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion method according to CLSI. Biofilm production was assessed by tissue culture plate method. Finally, polymerase chain reaction was conducted to detect four families of carbapenemase: bla IMP , bla VIM , bla NDM , bla OXA-48 ; biofilm formation associated genes: treC, wza, luxS; and K. pneumoniae confirming gene: rpoB., Results: Most of the isolates were resistant to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (52 %), cefotaxime (51 %), cefepime (43 %), and ceftriaxone (43 %). Among all the 100 isolates, 67 were multidrug-resistant (MDR), and 11 were extensively drug-resistant (XDR). The prevalence of the bla VIM , bla IMP , bla NDM , and bla OXA-48 genes were 7 , 11 , 5 , and 28 %, respectively. The results of biofilm formation in the tissue culture plate assay indicated that 75 (75 %) strains could produce biofilm and only 25 (25 %) isolates were not able to form biofilm. Among these isolates, 25 % formed fully established biofilms, 19 % were categorized as moderately biofilm-producing, 31 % formed weak biofilms, and 25 % were non-biofilm-producers. The antimicrobial resistance among biofilm former strains was found to be significantly higher than that of non-biofilm former strains (p < 0.05). Molecular distribution of biofilm formation genes revealed that 98 , 96 , and 34 % of the isolates carried luxS, treC, and wza genes, respectively., Conclusions: The rise of antibiotic resistance among biofilm-producer strains demonstrates a serious concern about limited treatment options in the hospital settings. All of the data suggest that fundamental actions and introduction of novel strategies for controlling of K. pneumoniae biofilm-related infections is essential.

Iran Urmia Lake, the world second largest hypersaline lake, has been largely desiccated over the last two decades resulting in socio-environmental consequences similar or even larger than the Aral Sea disaster. To rescue the lake a new water management plan has been proposed, a rapid 40% decline in irrigation water use replacing a former plan which intended to develop reservoirs and irrigation. However, none of these water management plans, which have large socio-economic impacts, have been assessed under future changes in climate and water availability. By adapting a method of environmental flow requirements (EFRs) for hypersaline lakes, we estimated annually 3.7·10(9)m(3) water is needed to preserve Urmia Lake. Then, the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrological model was forced with bias-corrected climate model outputs for both the lowest (RCP2.6) and highest (RCP8.5) greenhouse-gas concentration scenarios to estimate future water availability and impacts of water management strategies. Results showed a 10% decline in future water availability in the basin under RCP2.6 and 27% under RCP8.5. Our results showed that if future climate change is highly limited (RCP2.6) inflow can be just enough to meet the EFRs by implementing the reduction irrigation plan. However, under more rapid climate change scenario (RCP8.5) reducing irrigation water use will not be enough to save the lake and more drastic measures are needed. Our results showed that future water management plans are not robust under climate change in this region. Therefore, an integrated approach of future land-water use planning and climate change adaptation is therefore needed to improve future water security and to reduce the desiccating of this hypersaline lake., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)