Population growth and industrial development have exacerbated environmental pollution of both land and aquatic environments with toxic and harmful materials. Luminescence-based chemical sensors crafted for specific hazardous substances operate on host-guest interactions, leading to the detection of target molecules down to the nanomolar range. Particularly, the luminescence-based sensors constructed on the basis of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are of increasing interest, as they can not only compensate for the shortcomings of traditional detection techniques, but also can provide more sensitive detection for analytes. Recent years have seen MOFs-based fluorescent sensors show outstanding advantages in the field of hazardous substance identification and detection. Here, we critically discuss the application of MOFs for the detection of a broad scope of hazardous substances, including hazardous gases, heavy metal ions, radioactive ions, antibiotics, pesticides, nitro-explosives, and some harmful solvents as well as luminous and sensing mechanisms of MOF-based fluorescent sensors. The outlook and several crucial issues of this area are also discussed, with the expectation that it may help arouse widespread attention on exploring fluorescent MOFs (LMOFs) in potential sensing applications.
Keywords: fluorescent sensors; hazardous materials; metal-organic frameworks.