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1 Motivation<br />
Looking through the essential fields in nature and in our daily life, one can find that porous<br />
materials play an important role. For example, porous rocks can store water, petroleum<br />
and natural gas. Activated carbon as a prominent example of porous materials have been<br />
widely used in various applications involving purification of gas, gold and water, as well<br />
as filters in gas masks and respirators, etc. Another famous example is zeolites, which are<br />
broadly used as ion-exchange beds in domestic and commercial water purification and<br />
softening, catalysts in oil tracking, etc.<br />
As zeolite-like architectures, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) represent a young class<br />
of hybrid inorganic-organic crystalline porous materials, formed from organic linkers and<br />
inorganic build blocks (metal nodes). Ability to tune the inorganic building blocks as well<br />
as the diverse characteristics of the organic moieties featured in MOFs ensures its great<br />
advantage in comparison with the conventional porous materials (e.g. zeolites and<br />
activated carbons), which attracted huge attentions over last decades. Nowadays, MOFs<br />
are also extensively investigated as porous materials promising for gas<br />
storage/separation, sensing, drug delivery and catalysis, etc.<br />
Various synthetic approaches applied to MOFs afford to achieve their rich diversity, high<br />
level of complexity and functionality. For example, reticular synthesis (versatile design of<br />
functionalized organic linkers), design of mixed-component MOFs via post-synthetic<br />
modification (including metal and linker exchange), or mixed-linker/metal copolymerization<br />
has attracted huge attention with this regard. To note, the coordinatively<br />
unsaturated metal sites (CUS) in MOFs play a key role in many applications, especially in<br />
enhanced catalytic activity and effective gas sorption/separation. Hence, increased<br />
complexity by means of mixed-component MOFs can be combined with the generation of<br />
defects around the metal centers, which could lead to more open metal sites, or in the case<br />
of clustering of the point defects, mesoporous MOFs can be obtained. Thus, it comes to the<br />
“so-called” defect-engineering MOFs (DEMOFs). This manner of advanced modification of<br />
MOFs holds enormous potential to optimize the materials properties beyond the
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