Abstract: Aquatic products are rich in high-quality protein and essential nutrients such as minerals, fatty acids, and vitamins, offering significant nutritional value. However, during their production and processing, they are susceptible to contamination by hazardous substances including heavy metals, veterinary drug residues, illegal additives, and pathogenic microorganisms. Thus, rapid detection technologies serve as a critical means for the timely identification of such food safety issues. However, the complex matrix of aquatic products presents significant analytical challenges, making separation and enrichment steps generally essential prior to detection. Current rapid detection methods often lack compatible rapid sample pretreatment approaches, which can lead to issues such as false positives or missed detection. Among the novel materials, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as a potential class of porous materials for the separation and detection of contaminations in aquatic products owing to their exceptional properties. Firstly, the ultra-high specific surface areas provide abundant active sites. Secondly, the uniform and tunable pore sizes can be tailored for molecular sieving and selective adsorption. Moreover, they are easy to functionalize through pre-design or post-synthetic modification, allowing the introduction of specific binding sites, catalytic moieties, or functional molecules. Lastly, MOFs are constructed through the coordination-driven self-assembly of metal ions and organic linkers, endowing them with considerable structural diversity that can be tailored for diverse applications. These attributes make MOFs exceptionally promising as advanced materials for tackling complex analytical challenges in food safety. This review provides a comprehensive and systematic summary of the application advances of MOFs and their composite materials in the rapid detection of contaminations in aquatic products over the past decade. In sample pretreatment, MOFs and their composites serve as superior adsorbents in various sample preparation techniques such as solid-phase extraction, solid-phase microextraction, magnetic solid-phase extraction, stir bar sorptive extraction, and QuEChERS. For solid-phase microextraction (SPME), MOFs coated on fibers enhance the extraction efficiency of volatile or semi-volatile compounds. In magnetic solid-phase extraction (MSPE), magnetic MOF composites enable rapid separation from liquid samples using an external magnet, significantly simplifying and expediting the process. These applications significantly enhance the selectivity and enrichment efficiency of contaminants in aquatic products while simplifying the pretreatment process. In rapid detection, MOF composites are used to develop enhanced detection platforms by leveraging their unique optical, electrochemical, and catalytic properties. In electrochemical analysis, conductive MOFs or MOF-modified electrodes amplify the signals of targets. For fluorescence detection, luminescent MOFs serve as sensitive probes, often in ratiometric modes to improve accuracy. MOFs also act as excellent substrates or enhancers in surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) platforms, boosting Raman signals for ultra-sensitive detection of molecules. In immunoassays, MOFs are used as label carriers or signal amplifiers, improving detection limits for targets. Additionally, when integrated with aptamer-based biosensors, the large surface area of MOFs allows high-density immobilization of aptamers, enabling highly specific and sensitive detection of targets in complex matrices. These methods offer high sensitivity, specificity, and potential portability, providing innovative solutions for detecting trace contaminants in the complex matrix of aquatic products. Furthermore, this review discusses the challenges and future prospects of MOFs for the analysis of aquatic products. The significant challenges include the limited hydrolytic stability or chemical stability of certain MOFs in complex media, potential matrix effects in real samples that can affect performance, and the need for scalable and cost-effective synthesis of functionalized MOFs. Future efforts should focus on designing more stable and target-specific functionalized MOFs, promoting the integration of sample pretreatment and detection processes, and incorporating artificial intelligence for data analysis to establish an intelligent rapid detection system for aquatic product safety, which is of great significance for safeguarding public health.

Key words: metal-organic framework materials (MOFs), aquatic products, contamination, rapid detection, sample pretreatment