Bioinspired metal-organic frameworks for aqueous environment decontamination: from laboratory scale to real-world technologies

Concerns regarding water contamination are escalating due to the increasing presence of all types of pollutants in water sources, which pose serious health risks to humans and wildlife, disrupt ecosystems, and compromise the safety of drinking water. Addressing water contamination requires stringent regulations and increased public awareness, but especially, it requires the development of highly effective new technologies to decontaminate those aquatic environments that have been already polluted over the past few decades. Since the emergence of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), their use has been proposed in a multitude of fields, given their unique physicochemical properties, and one of the fields where a realistic application can be expected in the near future is water remediation. In particular, oxamidato-based biological MOFs (bioMOFs) have demonstrated, in recent years, unique properties such as extraordinary robustness, crystallinity and water- and pH-stability as well as very easy functionalisation, which situates them among the best adsorbents for this environmental purpose. In this review, we have summarised the most remarkable results of oxamidato-based bioMOFs in the field of water remediation. Moreover, on the basis of the reported results, we dare to suggest the real possibilities of application, in relevant real-world environments, for these and other MOFs, as well as the main obstacles that will need to be overcome, aiming to widening the range of applicability of MOFs and making solid headway towards sustainable development.