The recent developments and applications of chiral covalent organic frameworks

Abstract

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are a class of ordered porous organic material formed via the covalent bonding among various organic monomers. Recently, studies of chiral COFs have attracted great attention because chirality plays an important role in medicine, pharmacy and agriculture, and chiral COFs possess many fascinating characteristics like inherent porosity, tunable pore size, structural periodicity, high stability and reusability. Ascribed to the great advantages of chiral COFs, they demonstrate many potential applications in asymmetrical catalysis, asymmetrical separation and so on. One strategy to construct chiral COFs is using multifarious chiral building blocks to directly prepare chiral COFs. Various chiral COFs structures can be designed via choosing different building blocks and adding functional groups to monomers. An alternative strategy to construct chiral COFs is to incorporate metal particles or organic species into COFs via post-synthetic modifications.