Homo-Helical Rod Packing as a Path Toward the Highest Density of Guest-Binding Metal Sites in Metal-Organic Frameworks.

In porous materials, metal sites with coordinate solvents offer opportunities for many applications, especially those promoted by host-guest chemistry, but such sites are especially hard to create for Li-based materials, because unlike transition metals, lithium does not usually possess a high-enough coordination number for both framework construction and guest binding. This challenge is addressed by mimicking the functional group ratio and metal-to-ligand charge ratio in MOF-74. A family of rod-packing lithium-organic frameworks (CPM-47, CPM-48, and CPM-49) were obtained.