I am working on the synthesis of chiral porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). MOFs, the organic-inorganic hybrid crystalline materials, have widespread applications in the field of batteries, catalysis, gas storage, drug delivery, gas separation, luminescence, water treatment, CO2 capture, sensing, etc. By applying synthetic chemistry, the organic linkers could be easily modified to be chiral in nature. MOFs generated by such linkers will be chiral and therefore will have even wider range of applications than the regular MOFs. In addition to conventional applications of MOFs, chiral MOFs (CMOFs) could be applied for chiral catalysis and chiral recognition/separation. Chirality or dissymmetry is a necessary condition for several properties such as nonlinear optical effects, ferroelectricity, circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) etc. CPL is an emerging research field that find tremendous applications in display devices, optical information processing, chemical and biological sensing etc. Synthetically modifying a fluorophore to make it chiral could be a cumbersome task. I am trying to prepare chiral MOFs and chiral nano-matrixes that may be used as chiral host systems to incorporate achiral fluorophore. Achiral chromophore in chiral cavity may display interesting CPL activities and other symmetry restricted properties.
