Date : 2011. 11. 15, 3:30 PM Place : Mogam Hall, Bldg.500 -Abstract- The recent advent of porous coordination polymers (PCPs) or metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) as new functional microporous materials, have attracted the attention of chemists and physicists due to not only scientific but also application interest in the creation of unprecedented regular nano-sized spaces and in the finding of novel phenomena. We have found flexible porous frameworks, which respond to specific guests, dissimilar to the conventional porous materials. We call this new material as “soft porous crystal (SPC)”. Soft porous crystals herein are defined as solids possessing both highly ordered network and structural transformability. Soft porous crystals fulfill the following conditions:1)crystalline materials, having long-range structural ordering. 2)solid materials with softness, which can be rephrased as a reversible transformability, possessing bistable or multi-stable states. 3)porous material with permanent porosity, without an irreversible structural collapse accompanying with a guest removal and with a reproducible guest adsorption property, at least in one state. Note that the term of “permanent porosity” is that at least one crystal phase possesses space to be occupied with guest molecules. SPCs provide us with various unique functions on confinement and recognition of guest molecules, and responsiveness to chemical and/or physical stimuli. They also afford the efficient reaction vessels, which allow controlled living radical polymerization as well as stereoregulated polymerization of substituted acetylenes. Very recently, we have provided a charge-transfer type selective gas adsorption PCP, a bidrirectional chemo-switching PCP with the aid of spin crossover properties, a PCP with reactive open-shell atom sites, and a highly proton conductive PCP having one-dimensional imidazole aggregate at high temperature. In the lecture I will get onto the perspectives of “soft” PCP/MOF materials.