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INORGANIC CHEMISTRY
Porous materials provide a nanometre-scale playground for chemists to investigate unusual reactions that occur in confined spaces. But in the most widely used of these materials - zeolites and metal-organic frameworks - it is difficult to control the size and geometry both of pore openings and of the pores themselves. Writing in Nature Chemistry, Scott Mitchell and his colleagues report a solution to this problem in which the molecular building blocks used to create a porous framework are themselves ready-made pore openings (S. G. Mitchell et al. Nature Chem. doi:10.1038/nchem.581; 2010).
The authors' building block is a polyoxometalate - a 'wheel' of metal, oxygen and phosphorus atoms that has an...