Dear Colleagues,

The study of a special class of porous material known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) has attracted broad interest over the past two decades. MOFs are constructed from inorganic metal nodes and bridging organic linkers to create single crystalline frameworks with periodic porosity. MOFs share a similarity to industrially important zeolite catalysts that are characterized by large internal surface areas and uniform pore sizes. Even nicer, MOFs can be constructed from a variety of organic linkers and inorganic nodes to afford countless types of single-site solid catalysts.

The structural diversity and synthetic versatility of MOFs allows for the fine-tuning of electronic and steric properties of their catalytic active sites, which is difficult to achieve using classical heterogeneous catalysts. Compared to homogeneous catalysts, the active species of MOFs are site-isolated, which is crucial for avoiding intermolecular decomposition pathways including metal-ligand disproportionation, oligomerization, or ligand transformation processes to form catalytically inactive species. The feature that is attracting more and more attention in recent years is that MOF catalysts contain periodic cavities, which allow for catalysis to occur in confined space. The cavities offer ideal space for achieving cooperative catalysis of multiple functional groups, and could be redesigned to mimics the active site of enzymes.

The structural uniformity of the active sites inside MOFs allows for their structural and spectroscopic characterizations, which helps revealing the catalytic mechanism of MOF-catalyzed reactions and inspires further designing the improved version of MOF catalysts. X-ray diffraction and electron diffraction are essential to understanding the MOF structure with atom-resolution. Spectroscopic methods, including electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), X-ray spectroscopy (XAS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), are crucial for understanding the electronic property of the metal active sites.

Therefore, we are really excited to start this Special Issue to highlight recent progress in the field of MOF catalysis either in the format of research articles or reviews.

Dr. Pengfei Ji
Guest Editor

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• Metal-Organic Frameworks
• Catalysis
• enzyme-mimetics
• single-site
• oxidation
• reduction
• polymerization
• acid-base catalysis
• renewable energy