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Updated: Aug 21, 2026

Microfluidic-based Synthesis of Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs): A Tool for Continuous Production of COF Fibers and Direct Printing on a Surface
Published on: July 10, 2017
AI-Based Retrosynthesis of Known and Unexplored Covalent Organic Framework Monomers
Chin-Fei Chang1, Srinivas Rangarajan1
1Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Lehigh University, 124 E Morton Street, Bethlehem Pennsylvania 18015, United States.
Abstract:
Covalent organic frameworks (COFs), owing to their structural tunability, have a massive design space, of which only a fraction (∼1,300) has been experimentally reported. Using AI-based retrosynthetic tools for the first time in this context, we here address one of the inherent challenges in realizing hypothetical COFs, viz. the synthesis of identified monomers (building blocks). Two general retrosynthetic tools, ASCKOS and AiZynthFinder, showed a combined success rate of 76% in identifying routes to 359 experimentally reported monomers (of 600 2D COFs) with uniform performance across structural motifs. Further, these tools successfully identified synthesis routes to 83 unexplored monomers, capable of forming at least 1,200 hypothetical COFs. This work underlines the efficacy of modern retrosynthesis tools in addressing a challenge in the designed synthesis of COFs.
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