Bottom-up construction of a superstructure in a porous uranium-organic crystal

• DOI: 10.1126/science.aam7851
• Publication Date: 2017-04-21T01:00:23Z
• Authors: Peng Li; Nicolaas A. Verme...; Christos D. Malli...; Diego A. Gómez-Gu...; Ashlee J. Howarth; B. Layla Mehdi; Alice Dohnalkova; Nigel D. Browning; Michael O’Keeffe; Omar K. Farha
• Keywords: 01 natural sciences; 0104 chemical sciences

Intricacy anchored by uranium

Metal-organic frameworks generally have one level of assembly complexity: Organic linkers join inorganic nodes in a repeating lattice. Li et al. created a structure composed of cuboctahedra, assembled from uranium cations and organic linkers, that shared triangular faces to form prisms. These structures formed cages, which in turn joined to make tetrahedra that assembled with a diamond-lattice topology. This hierarchical open structure generated a huge unit cell with more than 800 nodes and linkers, containing internal cavities with diameters of 5 and 6 nm.

Science , this issue p. 624