Multifunctional Inosine Monophosphate Coordinated Metal–Organic Hydrogel: Multistimuli Responsiveness, Self-Healing Properties, and Separation of Water from Organic Solvents

• DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b00963
• Publication Date: 2018-05-28T13:14:40Z
• Authors: Neha Thakur; Bhagwati Sharma; Suman Bishnoi; Subodh Kumar Mishra; Debasis Nayak; Amit Kumar; Tridib K. Sarma
• Keywords: 01 natural sciences; 0104 chemical sciences

Outfitted with numerous coordination and hydrogen bonding sites, nucleotides represent a class of naturally occurring ligands for coordination with metals leading to both hard and soft materials for a wide range of applications. Reported herein, a new multistimuli-responsive metal–organic hydrogel through the spontaneous self-associative complexation of inosine 5′-monophosphate (IMP) with Ag(I) ions in aqueous medium. The strong and optically transparent hydrogels were formed without the aid of any external influences such as heating/cooling cycles or ultrasonication and comprise of an interconnected matrix of nanofilaments constructed from helically stacked, chiral arrays of Ag-IMP dimers. The metallogel exhibits diverse properties including self-healing, stimuli-responsiveness, transparency, and injectibility. The direct gelation specificity to Ag (I) ions is highly phase selective only to water, and the ability of the freeze-dried xerogel to gel water is exploited for the separation of water from vario...