In recent years, phase-selective organogelators (PSOGs) have attracted great attention as a new type of oil-scavenging materials for oil-water separation, because of their excellent properties, such as easy synthesis, low cost, and aqua-safety. These PSOGs could self-assemble via non-covalent forces into 3D fibrous networks, able to selectively capture and gel organic oil phase from an oil-water biphasic mixture. The formed gel floats on the water, allowing an easy separation from water through a simple filtration, thereby greatly eliminating potential environmental pollutions caused by spilled oil. As such, PSOGs might offer a promising solution to oil spill treatment. Despite of their great potential in oil spill treatment, PSOGs with desired properties are very difficult to develop. How to achieve efficient gelation of oils of widely ranging viscosities is one of the most important problems facing the development of PSOGs, which is also a prerequisite for their application in cleaning up actual oil spills. This review mainly summarizes the self-assembly strategies and applications of some selected PSOGs in an oil-water biphasic system, and presents the future developments of the field.

Contents
1 Introduction
2 Amino acid-based PSOGs
3 Sugar-based PSOGs
4 Acid and alkali PSOGs
5 Other types of PSOGs
6 Conclusion