Jenny Vitillo Receives Poster Competition Award
July 24, 2020 | Jenny Vitillo received a poster competition award for her poster “H-bonds and redox reactions make Co2(OH)2BBTA the first extended framework with a negative cooperativity behavior for O2” at the Porous Materials Group Poster Conference organized on Twitter by the Royal Society of Chemistry (July 23-24, 2020). The research presented in the poster is the result of a collaboration between the groups of Jeff Long and Laura Gagliardi.
Metal-organic frameworks, MOFs, can mimic biological systems in the way they interact with molecular oxygen. Drawing inspiration from biological O2 carriers, hydroxo species have been introduced in the Co2(OH)2(BBTA) MOF to stabilize cobalt(III)-superoxo species by hydrogen bonding. Jenny Vitillo, Ph.D., at the time of the research a post-doctoral associate in the Professor Laura Gagliardi's group and now an assistant professor at the University of Insubria, Italy, used the periodic density functional calculations showed in the poster to identify the hydroxo species as the main responsible of the negative cooperativity of this material for O2, that is the weakening of O2-binding as a function of loading. This property is typical of enzymes, but had never been observed in extended framework materials before this study. The introduction of negative cooperativity in MOFs and the understanding of its underlying mechanism will benefit all the O2 applicative uses, from catalysis to gas separation.
This NMGC funded work has been published in Nature Communications volume 11, Article number: 3087 (2020).
