Probing the Role of Anions in Influencing the Structure, Stability, and Properties in Neutral N-Donor Linker Based Metal–Organic Frameworks

The understanding of structure-property and structure-stability correlation has become an important facet of material development in the domain of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Owing to the paucity of stable compounds, the progress of constructing MOFs out of neutral linkers that exhibit remarkable promise has largely been stalled. To understand the influence of anions in affording structure features, properties, and stability in such MOFs, a series of MOFs constructed from same metal cation and ligand have been synthesized and examined. Further ascribing a structure-property correlation, the stable MOFs obtained in this work have been applied for sensing and capture of the radioactive pertechnetate anion TcO4-, via surrogate anions MnO4- and ReO4-, and capture of the greenhouse gas CO2. Notably, the sensing of such toxic anions has been rarely been explored using porous crystalline solids.