Chiral templated synthesis of homochiral metal-organic frameworks

The concept of chirality has been developed in various industrial and scientific fields such as chemistry, biology, physics, life and environmental sciences. As known, chiral materials show many intriguing properties that point to their numerous asymmetric applications. Therefore, asymmetric syntheses are increasingly important in chiral materials development. Homochiral metal-organic frameworks (HMOFs) can be promising platforms in this field. Despite many investigations about HMOFs synthesis (spontaneous resolution, direct and indirect methods), until now, no specific review has been reported about the chiral templated synthesis of HMOFs. This strategy is particularly beneficial when other strategies are evaluated as challenging methods. Given the importance of this chiralization method and the variety of structures obtained, herein we present a comprehensive review about the template-based synthesis of HMOFs such as template-free and assisted syntheses, introducing the various templates and the types of synthesis strategies in this method. Finally, we elucidated various chiral applications of HMOFs (chiral recognition, enantioselective adsorption, chiral resolution, asymmetric catalysis, nonlinear optics, circularly polarized luminescence). The findings show the superiority of the template-assisted synthesis approach with respect to the others, from easy preparation to high chirality induction. We believe this review can be suitable for active researchers in this field.