Chemical control of structure and guest uptake by a conformationally mobile porous material

Katsoulidis, Alexandros, Antypov, Dmytro, Whitehead, George, Carrington, Elliot, Adams, Dave, Berry, Neil, Darling, George, Dyer, Matthew and Rosseinsky, Matthew (2018) Chemical control of structure and guest uptake by a conformationally mobile porous material. [Data Collection]

Data Catalogue DOI: 10.17638/datacat.liverpool.ac.uk/589

Description

Chemical processes often rely on the selective sorting and transformation of molecules according to their size, shape and chemical functionality. For example, porous materials such as zeolites achieve the required selectivity through the constrained pore dimensions of a single structure. In contrast, proteins function by navigating between multiple metastable structures using bond rotations of the polypeptide, where each structure lies in one of the minima of a conformational energy landscape and can be selected according to the chemistry of the molecules interacting with the protein. Here we show that rotation about covalent bonds in a peptide linker can change a flexible metal-organic framework (MOF) to afford nine distinct crystal structures, revealing a conformational energy landscape characterised by multiple structural minima. The uptake of small molecule guests by the MOF can be chemically triggered by inducing peptide conformational change. This change transforms the material from a minimum on the landscape that is inactive for guest sorption to an active one. Chemical control of the conformation of a flexible organic linker offers a route to modify the pore geometry and internal surface chemistry and thus the function of open-framework materials.

Keywords:

Peptide MOFs, Flexible porous materials, conformational energy landscape

Divisions:

Faculty of Science and Engineering > School of Physical Sciences

Depositing User:

Alexandros Katsoulidis

Date Deposited:

30 Oct 2018 10:16

Last Modified:

30 Oct 2018 10:16

DOI:

10.17638/datacat.liverpool.ac.uk/589