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Generation of nanostructures containing from several to thousands of inorganic nanorods (NRs) organized in a highly ordered manner paves the way for applications that exploit directional properties of NR arrays. Self-assembly of NRs provides a simple and cost-efficient strategy for producing NR ensembles. This tutorial reviewhighlights recent advances in the field of NR synthesis, summarizes the types of ligands used for NR synthesis and stabilization, reviews experimental and theoretical work on NR self-assembly that is driven by interactions between the ligands and describes current properties and applications of self-assembled NR structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomass is increasingly used as a source of fuels and chemicals as a renewable alternative to fossil feedstocks. Cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin are converted into platform chemicals from which a large range of compounds are derived with different structures. These biomass transformation processes require the use of efficient and durable catalysts that should drive the selectivity of the process. This review focuses on the use of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and derivatives as catalysts for biomass conversion. After an introduction setting up the importance of the field and the MOF features that justify their prevalence as heterogeneous catalysts for liquid phase reactions, the two main parts of the review are the description of MOF synthesis and adaptation and coverage of the catalytic reactions involving biomass substrates organized according to the type of MOF. The last section summarizes the current state of the art and our outlook for the future development of the field.

The controllable encapsulation of nanoentities (such as metal nanoparticles, quantum dots, polyoxometalates, organic and metallorganic molecules, biomacromolecules, and metal-organic polyhedra) into metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to form composite materials has attracted significant research interest in a variety of fields. These composite materials not only exhibit the properties of both the nanoentities and the MOFs but also display unique and synergistic functionalities. Tuning the sizes, compositions, and shapes of nanoentities encapsulated in MOFs enables the final composites to exhibit superior performance to those of the separate constituents for various applications. In this tutorial review article, we summarized the state-of-the-art development of MOFs containing encapsulated tunable nanoentities, with special emphasis on the preparation and synergistic properties of these composites.