Investigation on the prime factors influencing the formation of entangled metal–organic frameworks

Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) have become a rapidly expanding research topic in the fields of synthetic chemistry and materials science in recent years. Entanglement is often considered to be an important phenomenon in MOFs. Currently, a large number of entangled metal–organic frameworks (EMOFs) have been yielded and documented well in the literature. The structure–property relationships of an EMOF can be directed and fine-tuned not only by the starting materials, i.e. metal ions/clusters and organic ligands, but also by the various reaction conditions, including reaction temperature, pH value, and molar ratio of reactants etc. In this highlight, we carefully attempt to analyze and summarize the key factors which significantly influence the formation of EMOFs, and we hope this work may provide some primary guide information to the predesign and construction of desired EMOFs.