title: Crystalline capsules: metal-organic frameworks locked by size-matching ligand bolts.
abstract: Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are shown to be good examples of a new class of crystalline porous materials for guest encapsulation. Since the encapsulation/release of guest molecules in MOF hosts is a reversible process in nature, how to prevent the leaching of guests from the open pores with minimal and nondestructive modifications of the structure is a critical issue. To address this issue, we herein propose a novel strategy of encapsulating guests by introducing size-matching organic ligands as bolts to lock the pores of the MOFs through deliberately anchoring onto the open metal sites in the pores. Our proposed strategy provides a mechanical way to prevent the leaching of guests and thereby has less dependence on the specific chemical environment of the hosts, thus making it applicable for a wide variety of existing MOFs once the size-matching ligands are employed.
authors: Department of Chemistry, TKL of Metal- and Molecule-Based Material Chemistry, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), Nankai University, Tianjin 300071 (China).
authors: Hao
authors: H
authors: Wang
authors: Jian
authors: J
authors: Xu
authors: Da-Shuai
authors: DS
authors: Zhang
authors: Qiang
authors: Q
authors: Chen
authors: Rong-Mei
authors: RM
authors: Wen
authors: Ze
authors: Z
authors: Chang
authors: Xian-He
authors: XH
authors: Bu
keywords: crystalline capsules; host-guest systems; ligand design; metal-organic frameworks; open metal sites