Chemists advantageous strategy for Mineral Polymers
Researchers at TMU's mineral chemistry department, in collaboration with Spanish researchers, have developed a new strategy for intelligently guiding the spatial arrangement of organic metal frames.
Dr. Ali Morsali and Hossein Ghasempour of the mineral chemistry department, faculty of Basic Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Daniel Maspoch of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Spain, have introduced a new strategy called «Net-Clipping» to intelligently guide the spatial arrangement (topology) of nano-porous coordination polymers known as organic metal frameworks.
They propose a new approach for deducing the topology of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) assembled from organic ligands of low symmetry, which we call net-clipping. It is based on the construction of nets by rational deconstruction of edge-transitive nets comprising higher-connected molecular building blocks (MBBs). They have applied net-clipping to deduce the topologies of MOFs containing zigzag ligands. To this end, They derived 2-connected (2-c) zigzag ligands from 4-c square-like MBBs by first splitting the 4-c nodes into two 3-c nodes and then, clipping their two diagonally connecting groups. They demonstrate that, when this approach is applied to the ۱۷ edge-transitive nets containing square-like 4-c MBBs, net-clipping predicts generation of ten nets with different underlying topologies. Moreover, They report that literature and experimental research corroborate successful implementation of our approach. As proof-of-concept, They employed net-clipping to form three new MOFs built with zigzag ligands, each of which exhibits the predicted topology.
The research project was published in May ۲۰۲۰ by Dr. Ali Morsali and Hossein Ghasempour of Tarbiat Modares University's department of Mineral Chemistry in collaboration with Daniel Maspoch of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in the «Journal of the American Chemical Society», JACS.
