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Anisotropic reticular chemistry

Nature Reviews Materials volume 5, pages 764–779 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Reticular chemistry has been focused on making simple structures in which a few kinds of components are linked to make crystals such as metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). While this chemistry has grown into a large field, a more extensive area with fascinating directions is emerging through the introduction of multiplicity and variation into the components of MOFs. When the MOF backbone is composed of more than two kinds of components, the resulting backbone multiplicity is regular repeats of those units. However, when variations involve multiple functionalization of the organic linkers or multiple metalation of metal-containing building units, it results in an aperiodic spatial arrangement of these variations, without altering the regularity of the MOF backbone. Such variance is represented by unique sequences of functionality or metal, and the very aperiodic nature of their spatial arrangement gives rise to anisotropy. These MOF constructs represent a new form of matter in which the sequences of such units are bound to an ordered backbone, thus adding complexity to an otherwise simple system, while preserving its overall crystallinity. It’s worth noting that, when a molecule capable of either continuous or multistate anisotropic motion is integrated within a sequence in a MOF, the resulting property goes beyond what is possible in simple systems. We term this emerging area ‘anisotropic reticular chemistry’.

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Fig. 1: Molecular components in metal–organic frameworks (MOFs).
Fig. 2: Emergence of anisotropic reticular chemistry.
Fig. 3: Backbone variance in multinary metal–organic frameworks.
Fig. 4: Structure editing for backbone variance in metal–organic frameworks.
Fig. 5: Functionality variance in multivariate metal–organic frameworks (MTV-MOFs).
Fig. 6: Metal variance in multivariate metal–organic frameworks (MTV-MOFs).
Fig. 7: Different modes of anisotropic motion in metal–organic frameworks.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) as part of a joint KACST–UC Berkeley collaboration, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21522105, 21922103, 21961132003, 21971199 and 91622103), the National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFA0704000) and the Science & Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (17JC1400100 and 17JC1404000).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley and Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Wentao Xu, Christian S. Diercks & Omar M. Yaghi

  2. Department of Chemistry, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials (iChEM) and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Molecular Catalysis and Innovative Materials, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Binbin Tu & Qiaowei Li

  3. Key Laboratory of Biomedical Polymers, Ministry of Education, College of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences, The Institute of Technological Sciences and The Institute for Advanced Studies, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Qi Liu, Yufei Shu & Hexiang Deng

  4. School of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China

    Cong-Cong Liang & Yue-Biao Zhang

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All authors researched data for the article and contributed to the discussion of content, and writing and editing of the manuscript.

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Xu, W., Tu, B., Liu, Q. et al. Anisotropic reticular chemistry. Nat Rev Mater 5, 764–779 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-020-0225-x

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