Recently Prof. Lan-sun Zheng (XMU)’s research group reported a simple self-template strategy to fabricate metal oxide semiconductor@Metal-organic frameworks (MOF) core-shell heterostructures, and successfully obtained freestanding ZnO@ZIF-8 nanorods as well as vertically standing arrays (including nanorod arrays and nanotube arrays). Their results show that it is reasonable to believe that the semiconductor@MOFs heterostructure potentially has promising applications in many electronic devices including sensors. (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 18, 2283)

As we know, ZnO possesses the richest morphologies at nanoscale (e.g., nanorods, nanobelts, nanotetrapods, nanorings, nanocombs and nanopyramids) among metal oxides. MOFs and related material classes are attracting considerable attention for their applications in gas storage/separation as well as catalysis. They have demonstrated that solvent composition and reaction temperature are two crucial factors for successfully fabricating well-defined ZnO@ZIF-8 heterostructures. They have concluded that the ZnO@ZIF-8 nanorod arrays can be applied to the detection of H2O2 in serous buffer solution. Therefore such novel semiconductor@MOF core-shell heterostructures may be potentially developed into a new-type of photoelectrochemical sensors with moleculesize selectivity.

The first author of this work is Prof. Zheng’s first year Ph.D student, Wen-wen Zhan, who was supervised and mentored by two professors Qin Kuang and Xiang-jiang Kong in Prof. Zheng’s group.

Original Article: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja311085e?mi=vx3ktd&af=R&page