Advanced porous materials: New developments and emerging trends

This article presents some recent advances in the production of ordered micro- and meso-porous materials with particular emphasis on non-siliceous compositions and morphology control. The potential and versatility of innovative synthesis strategies that have been successfully developed to broaden the range of achievable compositions and functionalities are briefly discussed. These include coordination of metal cations in the presence or not of surfactants, multiscale templating and nanocasting by hard templates. Promising results for traditional applications such as gas storage, catalysis and chromatographic separation are presented.