Groundbreaking Study Uses Femtosecond X-Ray Crystallography to Characterize 3D Dynamic Structure of MOFs

Crystalline systems consisting of small-molecule building blocks have emerged as promising materials with diverse applications. It is of great importance to characterize not only their static structures but also the conversion of their structures in response to external stimuli. Femtosecond time-resolved crystallography has the potential to probe the real-time dynamics of structural transitions, but, thus far, this has not been realized for chemical reactions in non-biological crystals.

In light of this, Hyotcherl Ihee from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and colleagues reported the use of time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography (TR-SFX) characterization technique to study MOF structures. TR-SFX is a commonly used technique for protein structure characterization, and the authors applied it to characterize MOFs containing Fe-porphyrin sites and hexazirconium metal clusters.