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The development of transparent electron‐selective contacts for dopant‐free carrier‐selective crystalline silicon (c‐Si) heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells plays an important role in achieving high short‐circuit current density (JSC) and consequently high photoelectric conversion efficiencies (PCEs). This becomes even more important when focusing on the development of bifacial solar cells. In this study, bifacial SHJ solar cells using a transparent‐conductive‐oxide‐free and dopant‐free electron‐selective passivating contacts are developed, showing a JSC bifaciality of up to 97%. Intrinsic ZnOX layer deposited by atomic layer deposition was used in this structure, which simultaneously provides negligible passivation loss after annealing and enables a low contact resistivity on the electron‐selective contact. With both side finger metal electrodes contact, this bifacial solar cell shows an efficiency of 21.2% under front‐side irradiation and 20.4% under rear‐side irradiation, resulting in an estimated output power density of 24.1 mW/cm2 when considering rear‐side irradiance of 0.15 sun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic engineering at the genomic scale provides a rapid means to evolve microbes for desirable traits. However, in many filamentous fungi, such trials are daunted by low transformation efficiency. Differentially expressed genes under certain conditions may contain important regulatory factors. Accordingly, although manipulating these subsets of genes only can largely reduce the time and labor, engineering at such a sub-genomic level may also be able to improve the microbial performance. Herein, first using the industrially important cellulase-producing filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei as a model organism, we constructed suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) libraries enriched with differentially expressed genes under cellulase induction (MM-Avicel) and cellulase repression conditions (MM-Glucose). The libraries, in combination with RNA interference, enabled sub-genomic engineering of T. reesei for enhanced cellulase production. The ability of T. reesei to produce endoglucanase was improved by 2.8~3.3-fold. In addition, novel regulatory genes ( tre49304 , tre120391 , and tre123541 ) were identified to affect cellulase expression in T. reesei . Iterative manipulation using the same strategy further increased the yield of endoglucanase activity to 75.6 U/mL, which was seven times as high as that of the wild type (10.8 U/mL). Moreover, using Humicola insolens as an example, such a sub-genomic RNAi-assisted strain evolution proved to be also useful in other industrially important filamentous fungi. H. insolens is a filamentous fungus commonly used to produce catalase, albeit with similarly low transformation efficiency and scarce knowledge underlying the regulation of catalase expression. By combining SSH and RNAi, a strain of H. insolens producing 28,500 ± 288 U/mL of catalase was obtained, which was 1.9 times as high as that of the parent strain.IMPORTANCEGenetic engineering at the genomic scale provides an unparalleled advantage in microbial strain improvement, which has previously been limited only to the organisms with high transformation efficiency such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Escherichia coli . Herein, using the filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei as a model organism, we demonstrated that the advantage of suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) to enrich differentially expressed genes and the convenience of RNA interference to manipulate a multitude of genes could be combined to overcome the inadequate transformation efficiency. With this sub-genomic evolution strategy, T. reesei could be iteratively engineered for higher cellulase production. Intriguingly, Humicola insolens , a fungus with even little knowledge in gene expression regulation, was also improved for catalase production. The same strategy may also be expanded to engineering other microorganisms for enhanced production of proteins, organic acids, and secondary metabolites., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.