Executive Summary : | Developing recyclable materials as a catalyst for organic transformations is crucial for the development of society and is environmentally friendly. Heterogeneous catalysts can help to reduce the amount of waste generated during chemical reactions, selectivity of a chemical reaction, cost-effectiveness, reduce the harsh reaction condition to mild, easy isolation of products and better control over chemical reactions. MOFs show great promise as a new generation of heterogeneous catalysts, offering high activity, selectivity, stability, and tunable properties. However, challenges remain to be addressed in optimising MOFs for specific applications and scaling up their production for industrial use. The project vision is to develop a bio-inspired hybrid material (inorganic-organic) with selectivity and efficiency produced by dynamic structural flexibility and the catalytic application to activate alkenes and get corresponding halolactones. The work focused on the designing and synthesis of a new organic ligand composed of the heterocyclic moiety clubbed with amino acids and merged with the catalytic functional unit. Because the synthesised MOFs is made up of the amino acids starting material, it believed to behave as protein in terms of conformational flexibility and interaction with different molecules. A new synergic, multidisciplinary experimental and computational capability to harness the dynamics of the materials for enhanced function, demonstrated in halolactonization reactions, will be developed. synthesis of medium-sized halolactones is difficult in contrast to synthesising five and six-membered halolactones, despite the interesting biological activities and structural diversity. The higher thermodynamic barrier diminishes the formation of medium-sized lactones by 104 to 106 times that of six-membered analogues. The slow rate of cyclisation and regioselectivity is one of the problems in the halolactonisation reactions; the formation of undesired by-products by adding halogen to the wrong position of the alkenoic acid and long reaction time. It results in lower yields of the desired lactone product and may require additional purification steps. Particularly, attempts will be made to tailor or tune the material with the different catalytic units and amino acids to find the optimal shape and size for the MOFs to have intermolecular interaction with the reactants to solve the problems in the halolactonization reaction. |