Ordered mesoporous materials at the beginning of the third millennium: new strategies to create hybrid and non-siliceous variants

In recent years, research efforts in the field of ordered mesoporous materials are shifting towards either hybrid materials, containing both inorganic (typically silica) and organic functionalities, or towards variants that do not contain silica at all. Promising examples of hybrid materials are periodic mesoporous organosilicas (PMOs); examples of non-siliceous mesoporous materials are carbons, polymers and metal oxides. They can be further tuned to obtain structures with a wide range of functional groups, and are candidates for applications in adsorption, catalysis, sensoring, microelectronics and several other applications.