Recently，a review paper entitled “Development of Ion Chemosensors Based on Porphyrin Analogues” (Chem. Rev. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.6b00021, http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chemrev.6b00021) was published online in Chemical Reviews (impact factor: 45.66). This review paper was contributed by Prof. YongshuXie’s research group in our college to the upcoming special issue “Expanded, contracted, and isomeric porphyrins”, upon invitation from Associate Editor Prof. Guy Bertrand and Guest Editor Prof. Jonathan L. Sessler of Chemical Reviews. The first author, Dr. Yubin Ding, obtained his Ph.D. degree in our college under the supervision of Prof. YongshuXie and now he works at Nanjing University as a research assistant professor.

    Porphyrins, which play important roles in photosynthesis for plants and oxygen carrying for living animals, are naturally occurring macrocyclic compounds containing four pyrrolic units showing excellent coordination and photophysical properties. Compared with normal porphyrins, porphyrin analogues show more structural diversity, unprecedented coordination properties, light absorption/emission, and aromaticity, etc. This review summarized the design, synthesis and optical characteristics of various porphyrin analogues and the recent developments in their ion sensing applications. The encountered problems and future perspectives for the research of porphyrin analogue based sensors were also discussed in this review paper.
    During the recent years, excellent results on the design, synthesis and applications of novel porphyrins and porphyrinoids have been achieved by Prof. YongshuXie’s group (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.,2016, 55, 3063; JACS, 2015, 137, 14055; Angew.Chem. Int. Ed., 2014, 53, 10955; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.,2014, 53, 14069; JACS, 2013, 135, 19119; Chem. Soc. Rev., 2015, 44, 1101).
    The work was financially supported by the National Basic Research 973, Science Fund for Creative Research Groups, NSFC/China, and the Oriental Scholarship.