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The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau Area (QTPA) has a complex natural ecosystem, causing a greatly increased risk of spreading various tick-borne diseases including rickettsial infections, which are regarded as one of the oldest known vector-borne zoonoses. However, the information of one of its pathogen, spotted fever group Rickettsia (SFG Rickettsia), is limited in tick vectors and animals in this area. Therefore, this study focused on the investigation of SFG Rickettsia in tick vectors, yaks (Bos grunniens), and Tibetan sheep (Ovis aries) in the QTPA. A total of 1,000 samples were collected from nine sampling sites, including 425 of yaks, 309 of Tibetan sheep, 266 of ticks. By morphological examination, PCR, and sequencing, we confirmed the species of all collected ticks. All tick samples, all yak and Tibetan sheep blood samples were detected based on SFG Rickettsia ompA and sca4 gene. The results showed that all tick samples were identified to be Haemaphysalis qinghaiensis, and the positive rates of SFG Rickettsia were 5.9% (25/425), 0.3% (1/309), and 54.1% (144/266) in yaks, Tibetan sheep, and ticks, respectively. All positive samples were sequenced, and BLASTn analysis of the ompA gene sequences of SFG Rickettsia showed that all positive samples from animals and ticks had 99.04–100% identity with yak and horse isolates from Qinghai Province, China. BLASTn analysis of the sca4 gene sequences of SFG Rickettsia showed that all positive samples had 97.60–98.72% identity with tick isolates from Ukraine. In addition, the phylogenetic analysis showed that all the SFG Rickettsia ompA and sca4 sequences obtained from this study belong to the same clade as Rickettsia raoultii isolated from livestock and ticks from China and other countries. Molecularly, this study detected and characterized SFG Rickettsia both in the tick vectors and animals, suggesting that the relationship between SFG Rickettsia, tick species and animal hosts should be explored to understand their interrelationships, which provide a theoretical basis for preventing control of this pathogen.

The key feature of amorphous/crystalline silicon heterojunction solar cells is extremely low surface recombination, which is related to superior passivation on the crystalline silicon wafer surface using thin hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) layers, leading to a high open-circuit voltage. In this work, a two-step method of a-Si:H passivation is introduced, showing excellent interface passivation quality, and the highest effective minority carrier lifetime exceeds 450 μs. By applying a buffer layer deposited through pure silane plasma, the risk of film epitaxial growth and plasma damage caused by hydrogen diluted silane plasma is effectively reduced. Based on this, excellent passivation is realized through the following hydrogen diluted silane plasma process with the application of high density hydrogen. In this process, hydrogen diffuses to a-Si/c-Si interface, saturating residual dangling bonds which are not passivated by the buffer layer. Employing this two-step method, a heterojunction solar cell with an area of 239 cm2 is prepared, yielding to open-circuit voltage up to 735 mV and total-area efficiency up to 22.4%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]