Over the last 15–20 years a wide range of new porous catalytic materials has been discovered in the wake of major developments in mesostructured materials and hybrid porous solids such as metal organic frameworks (MOFs). These two developments have both enormous potential to produce catalyst supports and solids. It may be argued that most existing industrial catalysts may be revisited for improvement taking advantage of the novel materials. In both cases new techniques allow controlling not only specific surface area and pore volume but even more importantly pore size distribution and therefore the diffusional properties of reactants and products. These are especially critical when dealing with large molecule reactants as frequently encountered and converting natural products. Both subfields are indeed yielding on a regular basis creative original materials which generate new catalysts, sometimes unexpectedly rejuvenating mature catalytic technologies. This special column is intended to illustrate these current efforts which for a large part are occurring in the Chinese catalysis community. The editors come from Canada and China, and the authors involve well–known researchers from Canada, Sweden, Korea, Taiwan Province and Mainland China. This column contains two review articles, one communication and seven original research articles.