Development of a porous bifunctional metal-organic framework for cyanosilylation of aldehydes and ablation of human laryngocarcinoma cells

This work presents the synthesis and properties study of a new dual-functional metal-organic framework (MOF) with the chemical formula of [Cu₇(nbpt)₄(H₂O)₂(OH)₄]·(DMF)₅(H₂O) (1, DMF = N,N-dimethylformamide) based on a Y-shaped tricarboxylic ligand 3′-nitro-[1,1′-biphenyl]-3,4′,5-tricarboxylic acid (H₃nbpt). This compound has been characterized by elemental analysis, FT-IR spectroscopy, thermogravimetric and X-ray diffraction analyses. The crystal structure analysis reveals that compound 1 is composed of a {Cu₇(OH)₄}¹⁰⁺ secondary building unit that is connected by the nbpt^3- ligands into a 3D framework with 1D nanosized channels running along the b axis. Compound 1 was investigated for its heterogeneous catalytic activities towards the cyanosilylation of aldehydes under solvent-free conditions, which shows that it catalytic activities could be greatly enhanced by removing the coordinated solvents, indicating that the exposed open metal sites in the activated 1 (1a) is beneficial to the cyanosilylation reaction. In addition, the anticancer activates of 1 has been evaluated on four human laryngocarcinoma cells (TU212, Hep-2, M4E and TU686) via the MTT assay.