Structural Insights into Metal-Organic Connectivity by Paramagnetic NMR

Abstract

Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are an emerging class of materials with numerous applications in domains such as
gas storage and separation, catalysis and bioimaging [1]. They consist of metallic centres with organic linkers between them,
forming a 3D network. These MOFs are difficult to analyze through x-ray diffraction (XRD) methods, thus the hope is
that Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) will provide meaningful insight into their structures. However, many MOFs
are paramagnetic, as many positive ions of transition metals contain unpaired electrons. Paramagnetic electrons introduce
complications to NMR studies of such compounds. Along with these complications, opportunities to probe chemical structure