Metal-organic frameworks as advanced adsorbents for pharmaceutical and personal care products

•Advanced water purification is essential for sustainable future.•The latest trends in MOFs for the adsorptive removal of emerging PPCPs.•MOFs play an important role as advanced adsorbents for PPCPs.•The optimized MOFs by various synthetic strategies can remedy water pollution issues. Water is essential for the sustainability of mankind. Due to the scarcity of water resources, access to fresh drinking water has been an important global agenda for governments and private sectors. Unfortunately, a significant amount of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are released into the environment, where these pollutants pose serious health risks for humans and other living organisms. Conventional water treatment processes are ineffective for such low-level pollutants. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), emerging as a new class of porous materials, are alternative and non-conventional adsorbents affording high porosity and impressive structural tunability. In this review, we focus on the latest advances in MOF research, especially for the adsorptive removal of PPCPs. Especially, the correlation between the structural property of MOFs and PPCP adsorption was analyzed to suggest a designable MOF platform. The structural properties such as functionality, aperture and cage size, flexibility and defect, and surface area of the MOFs could be considered to adsorb a variety of PPCPs efficiently.