MOF-based adsorptive removal of PFAS and antibiotics from water: Pollutant-feature-driven structural adaptation and interfacial mechanisms

The adsorptive removal of organic micropollutants from water is important for advanced water and wastewater treatment, particularly when contaminants occur at trace concentrations and exhibit diverse molecular behavior in complex matrices. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), with tunable pore architectures, metal-node environments, ligand chemistry, defect states, and surface functionalities, provide versatile platforms for pollutant-specific adsorption. However, much of the literature remains performance-oriented, emphasizing adsorption capacity and removal efficiency while giving less attention to how pollutant molecular features define adsorption requirements and how MOF structures satisfy those requirements under realistic aqueous conditions. This review focuses on PFAS and antibiotics as representative micropollutants with distinct molecular structures, ionization behaviors, and adsorption affinities. A pollutant-feature-driven framework is proposed to elucidate the relationships among molecular characteristics, adsorption requirements, MOF structural adaptation, and interfacial mechanisms. PFAS adsorption is primarily governed by chain-mediated interfacial enrichment, terminal-group anchoring, and chain-length-dependent pore accessibility, whereas antibiotic adsorption depends more strongly on molecular accessibility, multisite binding, and pH-dependent charge-state matching. We further discuss how metal-node regulation, ligand functionalization, defect engineering, and composite construction influence pore-wall polarity, active-site distribution, surface charge, mass transfer, and structural stability. The coupled roles of electrostatic interactions, hydrophobic interactions, π-π interactions, hydrogen bonding, and coordination interactions are further evaluated, with emphasis on their condition-dependent synergy and competition. This review provides guidance for the pollutant- and process-oriented design and evaluation of MOF adsorbents for targeted micropollutant removal in water treatment.