Recent application advances of covalent organic frameworks for solid-phase extraction

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are a type of crystalline porous polymers. It firstly prepared by thermodynamically controlled reversible polymerization to obtain chain units and connecting small organic molecular building units with a certain symmetry. These polymers are widely used in gas adsorption, catalysis, sensing, drug delivery, and many other fields. Solid-phase extraction (SPE) is a fast and simple sample pretreatment technology that can enrich analytes and improve the accuracy and sensitivity of analysis and detection; it is extensively employed in food safety detection, environmental pollutant analysis, and several other fields. How to improve the sensitivity, selectivity, and detection limit of the method during sample pretreatment have become a topic of great interest. COFs have recently been applied to sample pretreatment owing to their low skeleton density, large specific surface area, high porosity, good stability, facile design and modification, simple synthesis, and high selectivity. At present, COFs have also attracted extensive attention as new extraction materials in the field of SPE. These materials have been applied to the extraction and enrichment of diverse types of pollutants in food, environmental, and biological samples, such as heavy metal ions, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, phenol, chlorophenol, chlorobenzene, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, estrogen, drug residues, pesticide residues, etc. COFs can be synthesized from different materials and exert different effects on different extracts. New types of COFs can also be synthesized via modification to achieve better extraction effects. In this work, the main types and synthesis methods of COFs are introduced, and the most important applications of COFs in the fields of food, environment and biology in recent years are highlighted. The development prospects of COFs in the field of SPE are also discussed.