Biopolymer@Metal-Organic Framework Hybrid Materials: A Critical Survey

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of pervasive nanostructured materials that generate annually an incredible amount of work in different fields, spanning from separation, adsorption, sensing and catalysis to health care and nanomedicine. The combination in their framework of isoreticular ligands and metallic clusters have resulted in a library of confined organic-inorganic hybrid materials with high specific surface area, tunable multimodale porosity and a versatile chemical reactivity. In addition, their processing with synthetic polymers has been recognized as a milestone of their real implementation in everyday life technologies and practices. A step further toward sustainable MOF-based materials has been recently performed by the integration of bio-based precursors in their synthetic procedures either directly as polytopic ligands within the material framework or indirectly as coating reagents or functional surface-modified polymeric materials. This imparted to the resulting MOF-based bio-hybrid materials a set of additional advantages, including hydrophilicity, easy-processing, flexibility, shape-controlled ability, multifunctionality and most importantly, improved biocompatibility. This review article spotlights the fashionable trend in bridging the field of MOF-based materials through the use of bio-based precursors (mainly biopolymers) and discusses how the holistic association of the MOF crystals and the biopolymer matrices resulted in promising materials with prominent properties.