Transitional MOFs: Exposing Metal Sites with Porosity for Enhancing Catalytic Reactions Performance.

The exploration of transitional metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) is important due to their unique properties and promising applications. Hence, searching a suitable strategy to design transitional MOFs with different states becomes a key issue. Herein, we develop a modulator-induced strategy for fabricating transitional MOFs with carboxylic ligands by building esterification reaction. The exposed metal sites, mesoporous systems, morphologies, crystallinities and components of transitional MOFs can be finely controlled when different modulators are employed. Notably, the Pt/solid transitional MOFs catalyst with more mesopores enhances conversion in hydrogenation reaction of n-hexene, and the flower-like transitional MOFs catalyst with more Lewis acid sites exhibits better performance in the cycloaddition reaction. Therefore, the modulator-induced strategy may provide significant inspiration for preparing various transitional MOFs by building suitable chemical reactions.