Seeded Growth of Multipod ZIF-8 Nanostructures

We report a facile method to fabricate ZIF-8 nanostructures in the form of multipods. The success of this work relies on the use of seeded growth as the synthetic strategy, where uniform polyhedral ZIF-8 nanocrystals were prepared initially and served as seeds, followed by the addition of Zn precursor and imidazole to allow preferable growth to specific facets of the seeds and thus the formation of multipod structure. In particular, we were able to rationally synthesize ZIF-8 nanostructures in the form of hexapod and dendrite, respectively, using the similar seeded growth procedure, when the seed morphology was cube and truncated rhombic dodecahedron, respectively. Systematic studies were carried out to reveal the effect of several reaction parameters (e. g., seed amount and CTAB concentration) on growth pattern and thus product morphology. The current work demonstrates the feasibility and versatility of seeded growth for synthesis of colloidal metal-organic frameworks (CMOFs) with multipod structure and could find important use in fabrication of CMOFs with controlled sizes and shapes.