Abstract:
Porous materials display many important applications in our daily life. Usually, the applications of porous materials largely depend on the properties and structures of the pores. Although the study of porous materials has been of several decades, the features and functions of porous materials are still unpredictable. Indeed, the function-directed design of porous materials remains challenging. A " bottom-up” preparation method will be promising to make progress in the filed of porous materials, wherein porous materials are composed of preorganized pore structures. Therefore, it is crucial to create preorganized pores for the preparation of porous materials. Recently, pore-containing helical polymers have been developed as specific advanced functional polymer materials, and have attracted much attention owing to their potential applications in various fields such as molecular recognition, isomer separation, asymmetric catalysis, sensing, enantioseparation, delivery, and sequencing. Typically, these helical structures were spontaneously formed by folding of polymeric chains driven by intramolecular noncovalent interactions, such as hydrogen bonding, electrostatic interactions, and π-π interactions. In general, the pore structures strongly relied on the stability of helical conformation, thus the helical polymers with rigid backbones were required. The pore-containing helical polymers can be further used as preorganized pore structures for the preparation of porous materials through a " bottom-up” preparation approach. In this review, the recent progress on pore-containing helical polymer materials is outlined. In particular, the structural features and designing strategies of pore-containing helical polymers will be emphasized, and a few examples on pore-containing helical polymers have been highlighted. Additionally, these helical polymers show very important properties, such as biomimetic transmembrane transport, and can be applied in the development of advanced membrane materials.