Grafting on epicotyl of young seedlings has been introduced as a simple and rapid method for walnut propagation. Although this technique improves the grafting success and propagation efficiency, it is technically more demanding than the conventional walnut grafting procedures and is yet to be optimized. This study was aimed to investigate the influence of rootstock type (dwarf and standard genotypes), graft union covering materials (perlite, sawdust, coco-peat and perlite at 1: 1 ratio, and without cover - control) and different epicotyl grafting procedures (Gandev-Arnaudov and Frutos) on grafting success and performance of the grafted plants in order to optimize the walnut epicotyl grafting. Walnut seedlings were grown in a greenhouse. After four weeks, dormant shoots of walnut ‘Chandler’ were grafted to the epicotyl of young walnut seedlings. Grafting success and callusing quality were recorded 30 days after grafting. Growth parameters of the grafted plants, including number of nodes and length of internodes, height and diameter of scion, and survival of the grafted plants, were determined 150 days after grafting. Enhanced grafting success and performance of the grafted scions were obtained by following the Frutos’s procedure. Moreover, the highest grafting success (75.1%) and survival of the plants (91.7%) were obtained by using the dwarf rootstock and application of sawdust as graft union cover. In conclusion, performing walnut epicotyl grafting according to Frutos’s procedure by using dwarf genotypes as rootstock and covering the graft union with sawdust was suggested to obtain maximum propagation efficiency (68.7%).

Introduction: Today in order to produce vegetable fruits tolerant to adverse environmental conditions and increase growth, yield and fruit quality, grafting methods have been created. Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is one of the most important greenhouse products. Heirloom tomato cultivars lack disease genetic resistance and are particularly susceptible to epidemics in the field. Grafting can be used to unite the soil borne disease resistance and enhanced vigor of hybrid tomato cultivars with the high fruit quality of heirloom cultivars. There are deficiencies in vegetable grafting including skills for grafting operation performance and after the grafting, having enough knowledge to select rootstock, farm management in application of required fertilizers, graft incompatibility, excessive vegetative growth of grafting plant and physiological abnormalities, and fruit quality reduction. For grafting herbaceous plants such as vegetables, depending on the type of plant, plant size, grafting purpose, available equipment, preference and experience of the grafting plant producer and post-grafting management, different grafting methods have been introduce which is for different species and the used method is completely different. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages, which are effective in the survival and development of grafting plants. This experiment was conducted in order to evaluate the effect of grafting methods on yield and vegetative growth of tomato plants. Material and Methods: Three common grafting methods, splice, cleft and approach grafting were evaluated for tomato "SV 8320" cultivar grafted on "Rimac" rootstock. Executive operations were conducted in a completely randomized design with three replications at greenhouse of Lorestan Agriculture Faculty. Plant height, number of auxiliary shoot, number and length of internodes, number of fruit cluster, number of flower in cluster, root fresh and dry weight, number of fruit cluster, number of fruit in cluster, width and diameter of fruit, fruit weight, fruit fresh and dry weight, length of fruit tail, fruit tissue firmness, total soluble solid, pH, diameters of hypocotyl, pre, middle and total yield, ratio of the marketable fruits to second degree fruits, and fruit tissue firmness were recorded. Data was analyzed using SPSS software and means were compared by Duncan’ s multiple range test. Results and Discussion: Grafting method had significantly effect on plant height, number and length of internode, root fresh and dry weight, number of fruit cluster, width and diameter of fruit, fruit weight, fruit fresh and dry weight, length of fruit tail, fruit tissue firmness, pH, pre, middle and total yield, the ratio of the marketable fruits to second degree fruits at 5% of probability level. Vegetative characteristics and yield in grafted plants were higher compared to non-grafted plants. Conclusion: According to results of this experiment using different grafting methods lead to stimulate growth in grafting plants, increasing production and product quality. Changes caused by the rootstock are controlled through water absorption, synthesis and transition of water, minerals and herbal hormones. Signal generation in the rootstocks and transition of them to the scion, causes changes in the physiology and morphology of the grafted plant. Grafting success varied between grafting methods, so that splice grafting is better than other methods. Graft compatibility was shown by the ability of tissue to regenerate and the vessels ability in wound tissues to rejoint together then grow and develop as a vigorous composite plant. Attempts to increase the productivity of grafted plant should be followed by the application of good agricultural practices.

Dear Editor-in-Chief, Vitiligo is a skin disorder characterized by white macules with a distinct border. It affects 1% to 2% of total population. In vitiligo, melanocytes are partially or completely destroyed, first just in the epidermis, but subsequently even in the hair follicle, which serves as a reservoir for melanocytes during repigmentation (1). As a result, to treat these patients, melanocytes in vitiligo patients should be stimulated via medical and surgical methods. Some individuals refuse treatment with medical procedures due to its side effects and prefer the surgical way. . .

Background and Objectives The idea of bloodless medicine and surgery emerged when physicians had to treat patients who defied transfusion for religious reasons (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses); moreover, problems in ensuring safe blood supplies, the relevant costs involved, and the post-transfusion complications gave also rise to bloodless method. The aim of this study is to evaluate the reduction of allogenic blood transfusion, postoperative infection and costs in the bloodless group compared to the control. Materials and Methods A retrospective comparative study was undertaken for patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) at Isfahan’s Chamran hospital. Two groups of patients undergoing the classic CABG and the Bloodless techniques were compared (100 patients in each group). For bloodless surgery in addition to considering principles of bloodless medicine and surgery, autologous normovolemic hemodilution was done before operation (1-2 units) and patients were not transfused unless their hemoglobin was 9 gm/dl. Data were analysed by t-test and Chi-square test. Various factors were compared between these two techniques such as units of packed cells (PC) and fresh frozen plasma (FFP) transfused, length of hospital stay, costs and postoperative complications (infection, bleeding, etc.). Results In bloodless and classic surgery groups, 76% and 38% did not require PC transfusion, respectively. In addition, we observed a significant difference between FFP transfusion in the bloodless (93%) and classic technique (73%). No patient in the bloodless group received platelets whereas 2% of the patients in the classic group did. Overall length of hospital stay and ICU stay were less in the bloodless method; hence, the costs were less too. Postoperative infection was less in the bloodless method. These differences were significant. Conclusions The application of bloodless method for patients undergoing CABG significantly reduces PC and FFP consumption (P=0.001); therefore, the complications of blood transfusion such as post transfusion HIV, hepatitis, allergic and immunological reactions are decreased. Length of hospital stay and postoperative infections are also reduced which in turn reduce the costs (P=0.001, 0.001 and 0.037, respectively).

Considering present problems in the production of grafted walnut trees and the role of them in the production of uniform and quality nuts, this experiment was conducted with 11 different grafting methods and times including: cleft, earth up cleft, bark, tongue, shield budding at three times (spring, summer and fall), patch budding (spring, summer and fall) and chip budding. Treatments were arranged in a randomized complete block design with four replications in 2005. Also a preliminary experiment was conducted with the above mentioned treatments systematically in 2004. Results showed that there was a significant difference among treatments on the grafting percentage. The highest grafting percentage (93.3% and 83.75%) obtained nom the bark grafting operated at early May of 2004 and 2005, respectively. In the second rank, spring patch budding and earth up cleft grafting resulted in the 60% and 40 % grafting percentage, respectively. However, grafting success in the case of ordinary cleft grafting in both years was about 20%. In other methods and times of grafting the union of scion and rootstocks did not occurred successfully, although the graft union two weeks after operation was green. In conclusion the suitable time of grafting was limited to the early spring. There for, it could be recommended to propagate walnut by bark grafting and spring patch budding provided that scions have been stored at refrigerator.

A field-based experiment was carried out in Rukum (East), Nepal, from February to June 2020, to assess the effect of different methods and dates of grafting on the graft take rate of Persian walnut (Juglans regia L. ) in field condition. The experiment comprised ten treatments with combination of two factors. The two factors included the grafting dates including: 13th, 19th, and 26th of February, 4th and 11th of March and grafting methods including: outdoor grafting and bench grafting (tongue grafting in both). The experiment was laid out in a Randomized Complete Block Design with three replications. The findings revealed that bench grafting resulted in significantly better outputs than outdoor method for length of scion (at 30 and 60 days after grafting) and graft take rates. Bench grafting showed 44% graft take followed by outdoor grafting (38% graft take). Plants grafted on 13th and 19th of February showed statistically better results for growth performance over the other dates. Plants grafted on 19th of February showed 67% graft take with 53% saleable plants, but statistically similar to the plants grafted on 13th and 26th of February. The earliest bud burst was observed in plants grafted on 13th and 19th of February in 31 and 33 days, respectively. Bench grafting on 19th February showed significantly higher length of scion (16. 4 cm) at 60 days after grafting. However, non-significant results were seen for other parameters due to the interaction. Therefore, bench grafting on 13th, 19th and 26th of February led to the best graft take in Persian Walnut. Abbreviations: CV: Coefficient of Variation, LSD: Least Significant Difference, ha: hectare, mt: Metric tons, PMAMP: Prime Minister Agriculture Modernization Project, RCBD: Randomized Complete Block Design, SEm: Standard Error of Mean.

Automatic topic detection seems unavoidable in social media analysis due to big text data which their users generate. Clustering-based methods are one of the most important and up-to-date categories in topic detection. The goal of this research is to have a wide study on this category. Therefore, this paper aims to study the main components of clustering-based-topic-detection, which are embedding methods, distance metrics, and clustering algorithms. Transfer learning and consequently pretrained language models and word embeddings have been considered in recent years. Regarding the importance of embedding methods, the efficiency of five new embedding methods, from earlier to recent ones, are compared in this paper. To conduct our study, two commonly used distance metrics, in addition to five important clustering algorithms in the field of topic detection, are implemented by the authors. As COVID-19 has turned into a hot trending topic on social networks in recent years, a dataset including one-month tweets collected with COVID-19-related hashtags is used for this study. More than 7500 experiments are performed to determine tunable parameters. Then all combinations of embedding methods, distance metrics and clustering algorithms (50 combinations) are evaluated using Silhouette metric. Results show that T5 strongly outperforms other embedding methods, cosine distance is weakly better than other distance metrics, and DBSCAN is superior to other clustering algorithms.

Extreme grazing, illegal logging, fire and irregular harvesting are factors of forest degradation and boundaries change particularly in the upper parts of Caspian forests. Planting of exotic species such as Larix with good adaptability in these areas due to cattle's avoidance of grazing and immunity due to psychical effects on forest residents for its unknown identity, can help considerably to reestablishment of forest cover in upland degraded areas. Since there isn't enough seed for seedling production in the country and its high prices of seeds and currency need for procurement from foreign countries using of techniques that reduce the time to obtain enough seeds in the country is necessary. Grafted trees in comparison to non-grafted trees produce seeds in shorter time. Therefore, obtaining success in grafting was due to two factors: grafting time and scion diameter. According to the obtained results grafting time and scion diameter in prob., level of 1% and interaction between two factors in prob., level of 5% were significant. Therefore, the best time for grafting according to vegetative activity of stock and scion was the time that stock buds started swelling and scion buds were dormant (March) and the best scion diameter was more than 2 mm.