Boronic acid groups
have a high affinity toward cis-diols, which, when
suspended in a metal–organic framework, generate a novel adsorbent
for cis-diols. In this work, we followed a metal–ligand-fragment-coassembly
(MLFC) approach to develop a series of water-stable barium metal–organic
frameworks with uniform distribution of free boronic acid in the scaffold.
The 11B nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and X-ray photoelectron
spectroscopic (XPS) investigations show the enhancement in the inclusion
as the feed amount of boronic acid moiety increases. The findings
of the adsorption studies elucidated the importance of furanose isomeric
form of cis-diols in determining the adsorption efficiency.
Galactose is the favorable adsorbate which has the maximum number
of molecules in its furanose isomeric form (∼7%). The
developed MOFs are promising candidates for the isolation of cis-diols from aqueous solutions.