Metal (Ni, Pd, and Pt)-Doped BS Monolayers as a Gas Sensor upon Vented Gases in Lithium-Ion Batteries: A First-Principles Study

Real-time monitoring of the vented gases emitted by the thermal runaway of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) is of great significance to the normal use of LIBs. We study systematically the adsorption and sensing performances of pristine and metal-doped BS monolayers to five typical gases (CO, CO2, CH4, C2H2, and C2H4) emitted from LIBs employing the first-principles method. The adsorption structure and energetics, charge transfer, band structure, density of states, sensitivity, and recovery time are simulated and analyzed. Outstanding sensing properties are predicted for the Ni-, Pd-, and Pt-doped BS monolayers, although their recently synthesized pristine counterpart shows little sensing potential for those gases. The magnitude of the adsorption energy increases from 0.249 eV to 2.32 eV (Ni-BS), 1.954 eV(Pd-BS), and 2.994 eV (Pt-BS) for the CO gas after doping. Besides, significant variation of band gap is observed after gas adsorption in doped BS nanosheets, which leads to huge theoretical values of the sensitivity. The sensitivity for CO, CO2, CH4, C2H2, and C2H4 on Pt-BS may reach up to 5.87 × 105, 1.57 × 106, 1.81 × 105, 8.33 × 104, and 8.18 × 103, respectively. In addition, the calculated recovery times indicate that the doped BS monolayers have strong selectivity for the adsorption and detection of these five gases. The three metal-doped BS monolayers should have great potential for application in sensors monitoring the gases emitted from LIBs

Transcriptomic profiling of taproot growth and sucrose accumulation in sugar beet (<i>Beta vulgaris</i> L.) at different developmental stages

<div><p>In sugar beet (<i>Beta vulgaris</i> L.), taproot weight and sucrose content are the important determinants of yield and quality. However, high yield and low sucrose content are two tightly bound agronomic traits. The advances in next-generation sequencing technology and the publication of sugar beet genome have provided a method for the study of molecular mechanism underlying the regulation of these two agronomic traits. In this work, we performed comparative transcriptomic analyses in the high taproot yield cultivar SD13829 and the high sucrose content cultivar BS02 at five developmental stages. More than 50,000,000 pair-end clean reads for each library were generated. When taproot turned into the rapid growth stage at the growth stage of 82 days after emergence (DAE), eighteen enriched gene ontology (GO) terms, including cell wall, cytoskeleton, and enzyme linked receptor protein signaling pathway, occurred in both cultivars. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of paired comparison in both cultivars were enriched in the cell wall GO term. For pathway enrichment analyses of DEGs that were respectively generated at 82 DAE compared to 59 DAE (the earlier developmental stage before taproot turning into the rapid growth stage), plant hormone signal transduction pathway was enriched. At 82 DAE, the rapid enlarging stage of taproot, several transcription factor family members were up-regulated in both cultivars. An antagonistic expression of brassinosteroid- and auxin-related genes was also detected. In SD13829, the growth strategy was relatively focused on cell enlargement promoted by brassinosteroid signaling, whereas in BS02, it was relatively focused on secondarily cambial cell division regulated by cytokinin, auxin and brassinosteroid signaling. Taken together, our data demonstrate that the weight and sucrose content of taproot rely on its growth strategy, which is controlled by brassinosteroid, auxin, cytokinin, and gibberellin.</p></div