---

Nowaday, product quality of industrial factories ,has become the challenge for their market share in competitive world .Design of experiment (DOE), as one of the newest methods of improving quality, defines the significantly effective factors and sets their optimum levels by running the experimental design. Among all, the fractional factorial designs runs, have priority to others because of the decrease in the number of In Iran, Despite its disability in resolving interaction effects,Taguchi design as the fractional design subgroup, has been used sofar for its easy analysis. In this article, a fractional design with high- resolution degree, was defined as a case study on the refractory brick quality in Pars Refractory factory. To reach this target, the fractional design 25-1 with the high resolution degree of V,was designed and run. The results showed that controlling and setting the main interaction effects in the optimum level, lead to the minimum operation time and 41% increase in product quality. Research and development units can cause promotion in the quality of products by implementing fractional designs with suitable resolution degree and analyzing the main and especially interaction effects.

---

Multi-environment trials play a significant role in selecting the best cultivars to be used at different locations. The objective of this study was to identify grain and forage yields stability of grass pea advanced lines across different locations. The 14 advanced lines of grass pea, developed by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), were tested at three different research stations in semi-warm regions of Iran for three consecutive years. Ten non-parametric measures of stability were used to identify stable lines across nine environments. Three non-parametric tests (Bredenkamp, Hildebrand and De Kroon and Van der Laan) for Genotype-Environment (GE) interaction were highly significant, recommending differential responses of the lines to the test environments. Mean yields had a significant positive correlation with S_i⁽⁶⁾, NP2, NP3, NP4, Fox-rank and Kang’s rank-sum statistics. The results of correlation analysis and principal components analysis indicated that only non-parametric superiority measure could be useful for simultaneous selection of high yielding and stable lines. According to cluster analysis by forage and grain mean yields and non-parametric statistics, the line L3 with the highest forage and grain yields and Fox-rank as well as the lowest values of other non-parametric statistics could be introduced as high yielding stable cultivar for rain-fed conditions of semi-warm areas.

---

In this investigation, the Cordia myxa fruit mucilage (CMFM) was extracted by water to seed ratio 1:6, extraction temperature 58 ᵒC, and pH 4. After sterilization of extracted mucilage, its antibacterial activity was assessed on pathogenic bacteria including Salmonella typhi, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Listeria innocua, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus, Bacillus subtilis and Staphylococcus epidermidis under laboratory conditions. Antimicrobial potential of mucilage, at the different CMFM levels: 37.5, 75, 150 and 300 mg/ml was evaluated using disk diffusion agar and well diffusion agar methods. Furthermore, the interaction of CMFM with gentamicin and chloramphenicol antibiotics was assessed. Results shown that by increasing the CMFM concentrations, the inhibition zone diameter around the discs were noticeably increased. In the disk diffusion agar method, the highest inhibition zone diameter was observed at the concentration of 300 mg/ml CMFM for Staphylococcus epidermidis with 11.10 mm. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) for Salmonella typhi, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Listeria innocua, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus, Bacillus subtilis and Staphylococcus epidermidis was 64, 64, 16, 32, 128, 64, 256 and 64 mg/ml, respectively. Results shown that the minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) of CMFM for the all tested bacterial strains was greater than their MIC.