Recent advances of fluorous chemistry in material sciences

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in exploiting fluorous derivatives/moieties for applications that are not only related to reaction mixture purification issues and catalyst recycling, but to confer unique/improved properties to materials. Herein we will focus on the recent advances of fluorous chemistry in material sciences, with special emphasis on applications in organic electronics, crystals/metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) engineering and surface modification chemistry, in particular SiO(2) surfaces. By selecting major contributions in these areas, we wish to highlight the benefits imparted by the introduction of fluorous tags within/onto materials, such as favouring the self-organisation of charge-carrier compounds in bulk heterojunctions, improving the hydrophobicity and/or stability of coordination polymer networks, facilitating solid-state structural rearrangement of large magnitude within crystals or the modification of surfaces through adsorption processes.