Pure and Applied Chemistry

Abstract: Crystal engineering of coordination frameworks is a topical and rapidly advancing field, and a variety of entirely new solid materials have been synthesized. We describe the main challenges involved in the hydrothermal approach to these materials using, as an example, cadmium- and zinc-based coordination frameworks. We discuss the unusual crystal architectures of the products, and show that the kind and quality of the resulting crystals are directly controlled by the composition of the ternary reactive mixture and the temperature regime used in the hydrothermal synthesis.