Ultrathin LayCoOx Nanosheets with High Porosity Featuring Boosted Catalytic Oxidation of Benzene: Mechanism Elucidation via an Experiment-Theory Combined Paradigm.

Designing transition-metal oxides for catalytically removing the highly toxic benzene holds significance in addressing indoor/outdoor environmental pollution issues. Herein, we successfully synthesized ultrathin LayCoOx nanosheets (thickness of ∼1.8 nm) with high porosity, using a straightforward coprecipitation method. Comprehensive characterization techniques were employed to analyze the synthesized LayCoOx catalysts, revealing their low crystallinity, high surface area, and abundant porosity. Catalytic benzene oxidation tests demonstrated that the La0.029CoOx-300 nanosheet exhibited the most optimal performance. This catalyst enabled complete benzene degradation at a relatively low temperature of 220 °C, even under a high space velocity (SV) of 20,000 h-1, and displayed remarkable durability throughout various catalytic assessments, including SV variations, exposure to water vapor, recycling, and long time-on-stream tests. Characterization analyses confirmed the enhanced interactions between Co and doped La, the presence of abundant adsorbed oxygen, and the extensive exposure of Co3+ species in La0.029CoOx-300 nanosheets. Theoretical calculations further revealed that La doping was beneficial for the formation of oxygen vacancies and the adsorption of more hydroxyl groups. These features strongly promoted the adsorption and activation of oxygen, thereby accelerating the benzene oxidation processes. This work underscores the advantages of doping rare-earth elements into transition-metal oxides as a cost-effective yet efficient strategy for purifying industrial exhausts.

DGPD: a knowledge database of dense granule proteins of the Apicomplexa.

Apicomplexan parasites cause severe diseases in human and livestock. Dense granule proteins (GRAs), specific to the Apicomplexa, participate in the maintenance of intracellular parasitism of host cells. GRAs have better immunogenicity and they can be emerged as important players in vaccine development. Although studies on GRAs have increased gradually in recent years, due to incompleteness and complexity of data collection, biologists have difficulty in the comprehensive utilization of information. Thus, there is a desperate need of user-friendly resource to integrate with existing GRAs. In this paper, we developed the Dense Granule Protein Database (DGPD), the first knowledge database dedicated to the integration and analysis of typical GRAs properties. The current version of DGPD includes annotated GRAs metadata of 245 samples derived from multiple web repositories and literature mining, involving five species that cause common diseases (Plasmodium falciparum, Toxoplasma gondii, Hammondia hammondi, Neospora caninum and Cystoisospora suis). We explored the baseline characteristics of GRAs and found that the number of introns and transmembrane domains in GRAs are markedly different from those of non-GRAs. Furthermore, we utilized the data in DGPD to explore the prediction algorithms for GRAs. We hope DGPD will be a good database for researchers to study GRAs. Database URL: http://dgpd.tlds.cc/DGPD/index/.