Sensitive and selective detection of contaminants is crucial for environmental protection. As promising materials, engineered metal–organic frameworks with unique physicochemical properties of composites and framework modularity, large surface area, tunable pore sizes, and multi‐functionality have shown significant advances in environmental determinations. This review provides an overview of the key sensing parameters in analytical chemistry and outlines the synthesis principles as well as research progress of metal–organic framework‐based sensory materials in pollutant detection. Where engineered metal–organic frameworks serve as an integral component of the achieved function, highlighting the typical regulation strategies that involve tuning active sites, ligand functionalization, pyrolysis, and modification of functional compounds, among others, to achieve performance improvement. Following, we present the unique properties of engineered metal–organic frameworks that can be harnessed to develop different types of sensing systems based on the sensing mechanisms of spectrometry, luminescence, electrical transduction, and others to achieve highly sensitive and selective detection of different contaminants. Finally, the current challenges and perspectives on the development and exploration of advanced metal–organic frameworks for sensing are discussed.
Gao et al. (Wed,) studied this question.