Themed collection New frontiers in covalent organic frameworks: design and applications

This review highlights how the unique properties of COFs are harnessed to develop different types of chemical detection systems based on the principles of chromism, luminescence, electrical transduction, chromatography, spectrometry, and others.

This review article summarizes the design principles and strategies for the synthesis of functional COFs, with a special focus on their potential for electrochemical applications.

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are crystalline porous materials constructed from molecular building blocks using diverse linkage chemistries. The image illustrates electron transfer in a COF-based donor–acceptor system. Image by Nanosystems Initiative Munich.

Covalent organic frameworks offer a molecular platform for integrating organic units into periodically ordered yet extended 2D and 3D polymers to create topologically well-defined polygonal lattices and built-in discrete micropores and/or mesopores.

Strategies in covalent organic frameworks and adjacent fields are highlighted for designing stable, ordered and functional materials.

Owing to the unique structural features and facile tunability of the subcomponents and channels, chiral COFs show great potential in heterogeneous catalysis, enantioselective separation, and recognition.

This review provides guidelines for the function-oriented synthesis of 2D COFs from 3D solids to 2D sheets.

This review highlights the state-of-the-art progress achieved in two-dimensional covalent organic frameworks (COFs) with hierarchical porosity, an emerging class of COFs constructed by integrating different types of pores into one framework.

The current advances, structure-property relationship and future perspectives in covalent organic frameworks (COFs) and their nanosheets for electrochemical energy storage (EES) and conversion (EEC) are summarized.

We summarize in this review the current state-of-the-art development of three dimensional covalent organic frameworks.

This review article comprehensively summarizes the recent progress in the development of covalent organic framework materials for separation applications.

This review highlights the luminescent and unique photophysical properties of covalent organic frameworks. Their potential use in applications related to chemical sensing, photocatalysis, and optoelectronics are discussed.

This tutorial review covers the recent design, synthesis, characterization, and property study of COF thin films and covalent monolayers through interfacial polymerization.

This tutorial review highlights the representative advances in the new synthetic strategies toward covalent organic frameworks.

Covalent organic frameworks are crystalline porous materials with 2- or 3-dimensional structures designed modularly from their molecular precursors. Using bottom-up or top-down strategies, single- or few-layer materials can be obtained from them.

The structural topology of a 2D network defines its electronic structure.

2D covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are a class of porous polymers with crystalline structures. This tutorial review discusses how the concepts of supramolecular chemistry are used to add form and function to COFs through their non-covalent bonds.