Mesopotamia Journal of Agriculture

Soil salinity negatively affects crop production and leads to
loss of agricultural lands worldwide. In Iraq, poor agricultural
practices, such as inadequate drainage facilities and low water
quality, are known to be caused soil salinization. Onion
(Allium cepa L.) is an economic crop that is consumed heavily
as green or dry bulb onion. The cultivated area of green onion
was statistically decreased in the Kurdistan region, Iraq, lately.
Therefore, this study was conducted in the Directorate of
Agriculture, Ankawa, Erbil, to examine whether salicylic acid
(SA) mitigate the effect of salt stress and improve the growth
and development of green onions. Two different concentrations
of NaCl (20 and 40 mM) were injected around the base of each
plant and after 24h, SA (0.5 and 1mM) was sprayed to the
vegetative parts of each plant, evenly. The results showed that
the short-term application of SA was reduced the impact of
NaCl. The number of green leaves, leaf area, plant height, root
growth, bulb diameter, plant weight and total yield (t. ha-1) was
improved by the application of SA. It has been suggested the
application of a commercial or SA analogue to the agricultural
saline land may alleviate the salt stress and improve the
product.

The current study was carried out to evaluate and identify the genetic variation between Local Black chicken lines with two commercial Layer (Isa Brown) and Broiler (Rose) breeds using RAPD markers and sequencing approach of 18s rRNA gene. From the result of the RAPD marker, all primers used were produced 152 scorable bands ranging from 2 to 9 with the size ranging from 320 to 2990 bp with percentage polymorphic loci 64.86% among chicken populations. The highest amplified fragments by primer OPC-11 and lowest by OPAA-03 were 24 and 8, respectively. The mean of the observed number of alleles (na), effective number of alleles (ne), gene diversity (h), Shannon's information index (I) for all loci found to be 1.6486, 1.5189, 0.2883 and 0.4129, respectively. The existence of a high level of polymorphisms and targeted (74) loci throughout all chicken populations/primers indicate sufficient genetic distance and more genetic variability among chicken populations using RAPD-PCR techniques. Result of blasted sequences of 18srRNA gene of local chicken has GenBank accession number MT808178 and MT808179 by BLAST tool against Gallus gallus, it showed the highest identity 95.74% and 94.88% for data of first and second part, respectively. The overall dendrograms clustered showed that the local chicken was closer to the commercial layer than to the broiler chicken lines. Therefore, it suggests that improving the local Black chicken line according to the layer breeding program to collect genetically invaluable genetic resources.

The study aimed to determine the effect of spatial
variability on the erodibility factor (K-factor) for
alluvial soils located at Tigris river bank using two
empirical models ,KEPIC and modified
KEPIC( Kr).The studied alluvial soils were extended
along the adjacent area of Tigris river including three
sites (Mosul Dam , Al-Rashidia and Al-Busaif).The
results indicated that there is a wide variations between
the two models in estimating the soil erodibility. It
showed that use of the Kr model (modified KEPIC)
would be considerably lead to under - estimation
prediction than KEPIC model. The lowest values of
Kr model in comparison with KEPIC for three sites is
related to that the Kr -model take into account the
gravel fraction in their formula while the KEPIC is not.
These finding indicate that the computing method of
soil erodibility based on the Kr-model is reasonable
and most suitable for estimation soil erodibility for
scientific and detailed studies of alluvial soils (as in our
soil study) or in soils that have a considerable amounts
of gravels separate in comparison to KEPIC which can
be used to determine the initial values of soil erodibility
by water erosion.

This experiment was implemented to study the physical and mechanical properties of Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) manufactured from Old Corrugated Containers OCCs using three variables including density of board (0.6 g/cm3 and 0.7 g/cm3), resin content of urea-formaldehyde (8 %, 10 % and 12 %) and pressing time (25, 30 and 35 minutes). Results showed that board density proved to be an important factor affecting MDF manufacturing, board density showed significant effects on both Modulus Of Elasticity (MOE) and Modulus Of Rapture (MOR), while it had no significant effect on Internal Bonding (IB), higher board density (0.7 g/cm3) surpass low board density (0.6 g/cm3). The percent resin content and press time gave a significant effect on mechanical properties except IB. Also, it was noticed a perfection of boards combined at 12% resin contents and 30 minutes of mechanical properties. The triple intercourse between main effects showed to be significant for MOR, MOE and IB, generally boards made of higher density (0.7 g/cm3) with 12% resin content at pressing time 30 minutes developed better mechanical properties than other boards. According to the physical properties, board density showed a significant effect on Water Absorption (WA), Thickness Swelling (TS) and Linear Expansion (LE) after 2 and 24 hours of submersion in water. The resin content at 12 % and pressing time at 30 minutes showed better mechanical and physical properties.