Carbon Dots in Porous Materials: Host–Guest Synergy for Enhanced Performance

Carbon dots (CDs) are emerging as a new class of carbon nanomaterials, which have inspired growing interest for their widespread applications in anti-counterfeiting, sensing, bioimaging, optoelectronic and energy-related fields. In terms of the concept of host–guest assembly, immobilizing CDs into porous materials (PMs) has proven to be an effective strategy to avoid the aggregation of bare CDs in solid state, in particular, the host—guest synergy with both merits of CDs and PMs affords composites promising properties in afterglow and tunable emissions, as well as optimizes their performance in optics, catalysis, and energy storage. This Minireview summarizes the recent progress in the research of CDs@PMs, and highlights synthetic strategies of constructing composites and roles of porous matrices in boosting the applications of CDs in diverse areas. The prospect of future exploration and challenges are proposed for designing advanced CDs-based functional nanocomposite materials.