Structural designs of functional metal organic frameworks for the detection of mercury in contaminated water sources

Water contamination by mercury is an issue of serious concern and needs immediate attention for generating sustainable water resources. This in turn, requires efficient techniques for the detection of mercury so that its immediate removal from water sources can be ensured. Therefore, development of new sensors for the mentioned toxic metal is still in demand. This task specifically requires development of new materials and metal organic frameworks (MOFs) provide a promising alternate in this regard. These materials can be prepared by the combination of appropriate metal (preferably the nontoxic one) with the organic linkers. MOFs are in trend as a sensing material due to their unique properties such as high internal surface area, controllable pore size and high thermal stability. The current review provides recent developments in the synthesis of MOF based sensor(s) for the detection of mercury(II) ions along with the limit of detection. The coordination chemistry of MOFs with the active sites capable to interact with the mercury(II) ion is also discussed.