Metal-Organic Frameworks as Platform for Lewis-Acid-Catalyzed Organic Transformations

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are highly promising Lewis acid catalysts; they either inherently possess Lewis acid sites (LASs) on it or the LASs can be generated through various post-synthetic methods, the later can be performed in MOFs in a trivial fashion. MOFs are suitable platform for catalysis because of its highly crystalline and porous nature. Moreover, with recent advancements, thermal and chemical stability is not a problem with many MOFs. In this Minireview, an enormous versatility of MOFs, in terms of their microporosity/mesoporosity, size/shape selectivity, chirality, pore size, etc., has been highlighted. These are advantageous for designing and performing various targeted organic transformations. Although, many organic transformations catalyzed by MOFs with LASs have been reported in the recent past. In this Minireview, we have restricted ourselves to four important organic reactions: (i) cyanosilylation, (ii) Diels-Alder reaction, (iii) C-H activation, and (iv) CO2-addition. The discussion focuses mostly on the recent reports (42 examples).