Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 10, 2026

Author Spotlight: Accelerating Discovery in Microporous Material Chemistry
Published on: October 6, 2023
Structure of metal-organic framework nanocrystals obtained from electron diffraction data by iterative phase
Tatiana E Gorelik1, Tatiana Latychevskaia2, Irena Senkovska3
1Ernst Ruska-Centre for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich 52428, Germany; Ulm University, Central Facility of Electron Microscopy, Materials Science Electron Microscopy, Albert Einstein Allee 11, Ulm 89069, Germany.
Abstract:
We demonstrate the iterative phase retrieval of DUT-8(Ni) metal-organic framework (MOF) nanocrystals using high-resolution electron diffraction data. The reconstructed images show contrast features associated with the crystal structure, revealing well-resolved metal-containing rows with interpretable shifts. These shifts correspond to previously reported crystal structure disorder within the MOF. Furthermore, electron diffraction patterns display modulations in the low-resolution region, indicative of the rectangular crystal shape. Based on these data, we also successfully reconstructed the crystal shape image, which closely matched the observed form of the crystal.

