Members of the genus Paeonia, which consists of globally renowned ornamentals and traditional medicinal plants with a rich history spanning over 1500 years, are widely distributed throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Since 1900, over 2200 new horticultural Paeonia cultivars have been created by the discovery and breeding of wild species. However, information pertaining to Paeonia breeding is considerably fragmented, with fundamental gaps in knowledge, creating a bottleneck in effective breeding strategies. This review systematically introduces Paeonia germplasm resources, including wild species and cultivars, summarizes the breeding strategy and results of each Paeonia cultivar group, and focuses on recent progress in the isolation and functional characterization of structural and regulatory genes related to important horticultural traits. Perspectives pertaining to the resource protection and utilization, breeding and industrialization of Paeonia in the future are also briefly discussed.

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Introducing nonvolatile liquid acids into porous solids is a promising solution to construct anhydrous proton-conducting electrolytes, but due to weak coordination or covalent bonds building these solids, they often suffer from structural instability in acidic environments. Herein, we report a series of steady conjugated microporous polymers (CMPs) linked by robust alkynyl bonds and functionalized with perfluoroalkyl groups and incorporate them with phosphoric acid. The resulting composite electrolyte exhibits high anhydrous proton conductivity at 30−120 °C (up to 4.39 × 10 −3 S cm −1 ), and the activation energy is less than 0.4 eV. The excellent proton conductivity is attributed to the hydrophobic pores that provide nanospace for continuous proton transport, and the hydrogen bonding between phosphoric acid and perfluoroalkyl chains of CMPs promotes short-distance proton hopping from one side to the other.

Although transition metal phosphide anodes possess high theoretical capacities, their inferior electronic conductivities and drastic volume variations during cycling lead to poor rate capability and rapid capacity fading. To simultaneously overcome these issues, we report a hierarchical heterostructure consisting of isolated Mn2P nanoparticles embedded into nitrogen- and phosphorus-codoped porous carbon nanosheets (denoted as Mn2P@NPC) as a viable anode for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). The resulting Mn2P@NPC design manifests outstanding electrochemical performances, namely, high reversible capacity (598 mA h g-1 after 300 cycles at 0.1 A g-1 ), exceptional rate capability (347 mA h g–1 at 4 A g–1), and excellent cycling stability (99% capacity retention at 4 A g–1 after 2000 cycles). The robust structure stability of Mn2P@NPC electrode during cycling has been revealed by the in situ and ex situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) characterizations, giving rise to long-term cyclability. Using in situ selected area electron diffraction and ex situ high-resolution TEM studies, we have unraveled the dominant lithium storage mechanism and confirmed that the superior lithium storage performance of Mn2P@NPC originated from the reversible conversion reaction. Furthermore, the prelithiated Mn2P@NPC∥LiFePO4 full cell exhibits impressive rate capability and cycling stability. This work introduces the potential for engineering high-performance anodes for next-generation high-energy-density LIBs.