Function Decoupling and Modular Platform: Emerging Design Principles for MOF Luminescent Sensing

ConspectusAlongside societal development, large-scale urgent public health crises, routine food safety concerns and persistent environmental pollution have emerged as increasingly prominent challenges, prompting growing demands for rapid and reliable chemical and biological detection. Among various sensing technologies, luminescent sensing has attracted considerable attention due to its instant response, operational simplicity, and easily visualized readouts. In this context, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted considerable interest as heterogeneous luminescent sensing materials owing to their inherent porosity, highly structural designability, and tunable photophysical properties.Based on these advantages, numerous MOF-based luminescent sensing materials have been developed recently. However, most of these rely on highly coupled multifunctional designs, in which all functional sites are incorporated within a single framework component. Such coupled architectures introduce significant complexity in ligand and framework synthesis, obscure mechanistic insight, and require bespoke material development along with extensive screening processes. These limitations restrict scalable fabrication, constrain rational design, and impede the translation in practical applications.To address the challenges associated with tightly coupled multifunctional MOF components, the concept of "function decoupling" was introduced as a pathway for the rational design and construction of sensing materials. In this approach, luminescence and recognition sites are independently introduced, optimized, and assembled within the framework. Such function decoupling into discrete components simplifies synthesis, reduces redundant trial-and-error optimization, and enhances design modularity, enabling the establishment of clear structure-function relationships.Furthermore, beyond the initial concept of function decoupling, a "modular platform" strategy is further developed, in which the decoupled functional centers are packaged as interchangeable modules and incorporated into pre-engineered MOF scaffolds with reserved insertion sites. These modules can encode spectral and energy-level matching, coordination bonding, or supramolecular interactions, allowing the platform to be programmably customized for analytes with diverse structures and properties. By selectively inserting and matching the appropriate functional modules, this approach redefines MOFs from single-purpose sensing materials into adaptable, programmable platforms, enabling broader analytical applicability, while substantially reducing the synthetic complexity, matching effort, cost, and development time.In summary, this Account traces the evolution from traditional, highly coupled MOF architectures to function decoupled centers, and further to modular platforms. First, the function decoupling strategy, in which the luminescence and recognition centers are sequentially introduced, reduces the synthetic complexity and extensive screening and matching challenges associated with conventional designs. Based on this, decoupled interchangeable functional modules are further packaged and incorporated into pre-engineered MOFs, enabling platform-based, customizable sensing, and providing a generalizable methodology for designing practical luminescent sensing materials. Collectively, this strategy establishes a rational and scalable design paradigm that bridges fundamental structure-function understanding with practical deployment and is expected to accelerate the development of next-generation programmable sensing systems across diverse analytical and real-world applications.