Recent advances in facile synthesis and applications of covalent organic framework materials as superior adsorbents in sample pretreatment

Sample pretreatment is an essential step in analytical chemistry, especially for the analysis of organic pollutants from environmental, biological and food samples. Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are an emerging group of microporous materials. Recently, COFs have attracted increasing attentions in the field of sample pretreatment due to their advantages such as high surface area, tunable pore size, good chemical selectivity and thermal stability. This review outlined the diverse ways for the facile preparation of COFs, and also summarized the applications of COFs as novel sorbents for the extraction of diverse targeted analytes (such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, phenols, pyrethroids and pesticides) from complex samples. In addition, the deficiencies and development prospects of COF materials for sample pretreatment in the future were also discussed. This review hopefully can stimulate interdisciplinary research at the intersection of COFs and sample pretreatment.