Species of genus Chrotogonus (surface grasshoppers) are phytophagous and damaging to various economical important plants in their seedling stages. In order to know the biodiversity of surface grasshoppers, the detailed study has been conducted from four provinces of Pakistan. During this study, biodiversity, taxonomy, diagnosis, morphometric analysis, habitat, global distribution, and remarks of each species have been described. Total of 826 specimens were collected and sorted out into three species and three subspecies: C. (Chrotogonus) homalodemus homalodemus (Blanchard, 1836), C. (Chrotogonus) homalodemus (Blanchard, 1836), C. (Chrotogonus) trachypter

Background: Salivary tumors are uncommon, being of low incidence worldwide. This study aimed to assess cases collected in this series of salivary gland tumors in regard to histopathological typing, in relation to age, site and gender. Materials and methods: This is a retrospective study; cases were collected from public and private laboratories. A total number of 171 cases were collected. The slides were reviewed and reclassified for histopathological typing according to WHO classification 2005. Results: Benign tumors were more common than malignant tumors. The most common histological type was benign mixed tumor, followed by Warthin’s tumor. The most common malignant tumor was adenoid cystic carcinoma. One hundred twenty three cases ou

Elevated Interleukin-13 (IL-13) may play an important role in the pathophysiology of COVID-19, yet, the attenuated response did not notice across all severe cases. Susceptibility to asthma in specific populations is associated with several SNPs of multifunctional cytokines, such as IL-13, IL-31 and IL-33. This prospective case-control study is designed to investigate the extent of genetic susceptibility in subsets of Iraqi patients with COVID-19 by targeting the variants of interleukin IL-13rs20541 polymorphism in relation to disease susceptibility and severity of clinical presentation. One hundred samples were obtained from the throat, nasopharyngeal and nasal swabs enrolled in this study. Eighty samples of the throat, nasopharyngeal and

Regular sampling for six months from January to July 2012 were taken in small, shallow, perennial, standing ponds near the Greater Zab River, Gwer district, Erbil. A variety of physicochemical parameters were determined. Air and water temperature were falling between 15.2 - 34.7 ? C and 15.5 and 26.5 ?C. The waters are neutral (pH 7.38-8.27), hard, alkaline, salty, high in TDS and EC (892-966?S/cm, and rich in nutrients (NO3: 2.1-4.1mg/l, PO4: 0.33-0.62 mg / l , SO4: 24.7-80.2 mg / l ). The attention fixed on a filamentous blue- green algae Glaucospira Lagerheim, 1982) which is new to Iraqi flora. It is a filament (trichome), solitary, pale or yellowish blue – green, without sheath, Screw like coiled, motile, some of them are activ

BP algorithm is the most widely used supervised training algorithms for multi-layered feedforward neural net works. However, BP takes long time to converge and quite sensitive to the initial weights of a network. In this paper, a modified cuckoo search algorithm is used to get the optimal set of initial weights that will be used by BP algorithm. And changing the value of BP learning rate to improve the error convergence. The performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm is compared with the stan dard BP using simple data sets. The simulation result show that the proposed algorithm has improved the BP training in terms of quick convergence of the solution depending on the slope of the error graph.

Background: Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic destructive inflammatory disease associated with destruction of joint connective tissues and bones, affecting 0.5%–1% of the population worldwide reporting higher prevalence of periodontitis among rheumatoid arthritis patients. The purpose of this study is to estimate level of salivary C-reactive protein in relation to the occurrence and severity of the periodontal disease and other oral parameters among group of patients with rheumatoid arthritis Material and methods: Fifty women patients with rheumatoid arthritis; twenty five on Methotrexate treatment and twenty five on combination treatment of Methotrexate and Etanercept selected as study groups with an age range (30-40) years old and

An experiment was conducted in pots under field conditions during fall seasons of 2017 and 2018. This study aimed to improve a weak growth of seedlings under salt stress in sorghum. Three factors were studied. 1st factor was three cultivars (Inqath, Rabeh, and Buhoth70). 2nd factor was seed priming (primed and unprimed seed). Seed were primed by soaking for 12 hours in a solution containing 300 + 70 mg L−1 of gibberellic (GA3) and salicylic (SA) acids, respectively. 3rd factor was irrigation with saline water (6, 9 and 12 dS m−1) resulting from dissolving sodium chloride in distilled water in addition to control treatment (distilled water). Randomized complete block design was used with four replications. In both seasons: the results sh

The thermodynamic constanting of “crude and partially purified” Paraxonase(PON) was evaluated in the sera of “healthy and ectopic” pregnant women in order to characterize the reaction of PON with diethyl para-nitro phenyl phosphate as substrate.This study was performed on (17) women with ectopic pregnancy (EP) whose age between (25-55) years  and (25) normal pregnant women with  a mean age of (25 -55) years as  a control group . Samples were collected from the Medical City, AL-Yarmook and Fatema AL-Zahraa hospitals during the period from Sep.2011 to April 2012.The study included the evaluation  of “paraxonase activity, specific activity and total protein” in the (crude and partially purified) sera of EP pa

Background: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic and systemic autoimmune disease that is characterized by severe synovial inflammation, cartilage erosion, bone loss, and generalized vasculopathy. Although the immunologic mechanism of RA is still unclear, it is now thought to be a primarily Th17-driven disease. Along with other factors, IL-23 stimulates the expansion of Th17 cells from naive CD4+ T cells.

Objective: The objective of this study is to assess the circulating levels of interleukin (IL)-23 in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and determine the correlation between plasma/serum IL-23 levels and disease activity. So, we performed a systematic review with meta-analysis comparing