The Faculty of Graduate Studies awarded the researcher Hana Jardaneh a Master’s Degree in Plant Production in response to her thesis entitled “The Effect of Bacillus Megaterium on Barley Tolerance to Salinity”.

In Palestine, Soil and water salinity is one of the most important environmental parameters that affect negatively on the growth of barley and more harmful to crop plants. The current research aimed to evaluate the effect of  inoculation Bacillus Megaterium on 3 different variety of barley ( Reehan ,Nabawi and Icarda 5)

which are  grown under 5 different salinity level (0, 50, 100, 150 & 200 mM).

This study show  that  B. Megaterium  have positive  effect on agronomic traits of  barley such as on chlorophyll content by reducing the effect of salinity due to increase chlorophyll content in plant which  inoculated with bacteria.

Bacillus megaterium inoculation show increasing in the level of awn roughness slightly.

Different growth parameters; leaf length, width and number, root weight, shoot weight and plant height was highly influenced by salinity levels. However bacterial inoculation reduces the effect of salinity on these parameters. Furthermore a slight positive fluctuation at 100-150mM was also observed in plant response to bacterial inoculation.

Different chemical accumulation response was observed in the three barley varieties to salinity and bacterial inoculation treatments, for example the level of Ca, Na, and K in Reehan was higher at higher level of salinity and higher accumulation in shoot. The same trend was observed for Nabawi and Icarda 5 in relative to K and Ca, but the opposite for Na as its accumulation reduce with response to bacterial inoculation and salinity.

The committee consisted of: Dr. Heba Al-Fares as a main supervisor and Chairman, Dr. Abdallah Omari as a second supervisor, Dr. Subhi Samhan as an external examiner and Prof. Hassan Abu Qaoud as an internal examiner.

At the end of the session, the committee approved the success of the researcher and recommended her a Master’s degree.