Porous materials are invaluable 'hosts' — that is, they are useful for storing, separating and investigating various guest compounds. Typical hosts are inorganic materials called zeolites (which contain a lattice structure) or so-called granular activated carbon, which possesses a large internal surface area to accommodate guests. Just recently, a third group of materials, metal-organic frameworks known as coordination polymers, have joined this party of excellent hosts. Writing in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Takamizawa and colleagues report a canny use of a coordination polymer to store molecular oxygen (strictly, dioxygen, O_2) as an ordered array of three molecules (a trimer) or as a regular one-dimensional chain over a wide range of temperatures.
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