The ever-increasing landscape of heterogeneous catalysis,
pure
and applied, utilizes many different catalysts. Academic insights
along with many industrial adaptations paved the way for the growth.
In designing a catalyst, it is desirable to have a priori knowledge of what structure needs to be targeted to help in achieving
the goal. When focusing on catalysis, one needs to cope with a vast
corpus of knowledge and information. The overwhelming desire to exploit
catalysis toward commercial ends is irresistible. In today’s
world, one of the requirements of developing a new catalyst is to
address the environmental concerns. The well-established heterogeneous
catalysts have microporous structures (<25 Å), which find
use in many industrial processes. The metal–organic framework
(MOF) compounds, being pursued vigorously during the last two decades,
have similar microporosity with well-defined pores and channels. The
MOFs possess large surface area and assemble to delicate structural
and compositional variations either during the preparation or through
postsynthetic modifications (PSMs). The MOFs, in fact, offer excellent
scope as simple Lewis acidic, Brönsted acidic, Lewis basic,
and more importantly bifunctional (acidic as well as basic) agents
for carrying out catalysis. The many advances that happened over the
years in biology helped in the design of many good biocatalysts. The
tools and techniques (advanced preparative approaches coupled with
computational insights), on the other hand, have helped in generating
interesting and good inorganic catalysts. In this review, the recent
advances in bifunctional catalysis employing MOFs are presented. In
doing so, we have concentrated on the developments that happened during
the past decade or so.