Functional metal–organic frameworks constructed from triphenylamine-based polycarboxylate ligands

The employment of triphenylamine-based polycarboxylate ligands for the construction of functional metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) is deeply reviewed, which provides a new type of functional materials with potential applications. [Display omitted] •MOFs built up with triphenylamine-based polycarboxylate ligands were reviewed.•Synthetic routes and structural features of triphenylamine-based MOFs were introduced.•Functional applications (gas storage and separation, luminescent, etc.) were discussed. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), emerging as a new type of multifunctional materials, have been realized for their diverse applications in various fields. Such porous crystalline solids are constructed from metal ions/clusters coordinated by organic linkers. Wide and deep researches have shown that design and synthesis of organic linkers are very vital to target MOFs with expected properties. Recently, triphenylamine has gained extensive attention due to their remarkable performance in photoelectric field. So many attempts have been made to modify the triphenylamine unit, including the introduction of iminazole, 1,2,4-triazole, pyridine, pyrimidine and carboxy groups, etc. Among these ligands, the triphenylamine-based polycarboxylate ligands are getting a lot of attention lately, because they can be used to not only construct the MOFs with high porosities, which have excellent performance in gas storage and separation, but also build MOFs with prominent optical properties. In this review, a comprehensive summarization relevant to the MOFs constructed from triphenylamine-based tri-, tetra- and hexacarboxylate linkers in the last decade will be presented. We discuss the synthesis routes and the structural types, as well as notable properties (such as gas storage and separation, heterogeneous catalysis, luminescent sensing and second-order nonlinear optics, etc.).