Having access to clean water is a mandatory requirement for the proper development of living beings.

We report a novel metal–organic framework (MOF) featuring functional pores decorated with hydroxyl groups derived from the natural amino acid L-serine, which is able to establish specific interactions of different natures, strengths and directionalities with organic molecules of technological interest, i.e. ascorbic acid, pyridoxine, bupropion and 17-β-estradiol, based on their different sizes and chemical natures. The ability of 1 to distinctly organize guest molecules within its channels, through the concomitant effect of different directing supramolecular host–guest interactions, enables gaining unique insights, by means of single-crystal X-ray crystallography, into the host–guest interactions. These results increase our understanding of molecular recognition processes in MOFs, opening a myriad of potential technological applications in the near future.

The exact chemical structure of non–crystallising natural products is still one of the main challenges in Natural Sciences. Despite tremendous advances in total synthesis, the absolute structural determination of a myriad of natural products with very sensitive chemical functionalities remains undone. Here, we show that a metal–organic framework (MOF) with alcohol–containing arms and adsorbed water, enables selective hydrolysis of glycosyl bonds, supramolecular order with the so–formed chiral fragments and absolute determination of the organic structure by single–crystal X–ray crystallography in a single operation. This combined strategy based on a biomimetic, cheap, robust and multigram available solid catalyst opens the door to determine the absolute configuration of ketal compounds regardless degradation sensitiveness, and also to design extremely–mild metal–free solid–catalysed processes without formal acid protons.