Construction of boronate ester based single-layered covalent organic frameworks

Boronate ester based single-layered covalent organic frameworks (sCOFs) with large domain areas and uniform pore sizes have been fabricated on graphite under an ambient atmosphere. The phase separation to generate the boronate ester based sCOFs, boroxine based sCOFs and other nanostructures could be tuned using the molecular ratio of the two precursors, demonstrating a self-sorting process for on-surface dynamic covalent chemistry.