Metal-Organic Frameworks: Metal-Organic Frameworks: A Rapidly Growing Class of Versatile Nanoporous Materials (Adv. Mater. 2/2011)

Metal‐organic frameworks (MOFs) represent a new class of hybrid organic‐inorganic supramolecular materials comprised of ordered networks formed from organic electron donor linkers and metal cations. They can exhibit extremely high surface areas, as well as tunable pore size and functionality, and can act as hosts for a variety of guest molecules. Since their discovery, MOFs have enjoyed extensive exploration, with applications ranging from gas storage to drug delivery to sensing. This review covers advances in the MOF field from the past three years, focusing on applications, including gas separation, catalysis, drug delivery, optical and electronic applications, and sensing. We also summarize recent work on methods for MOF synthesis and computational modeling. The cover shows the structure of IRMOF‐10, one of a rapidly expanding class of crystalline nano porous materials known as metal‐organic frameworks (MOFs), which have synthetically tailorable pore dimensions and chemical properties. The versatility of these novel materials is generating interest across a wide spectrum of applications, including luminescent materials (crystals, lower left), drug delivery (middle polyhedron), and gas storage and separation (lower right). The status of these applications is reviewed on p. 249 by Mark Allendorf and co‐workers.