The 2025 chemistry Nobel goes to MOFs

It’s a material world after all. And this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to researchers who created a family of materials that could help solve some of humanity’s most critical problems.

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi have won the chemistry Nobel Prize “for the development of metal–organic frameworks [MOFs],” a large family of porous crystalline solids with mindbogglingly high surface areas.

“This year’s award is a story full of holes, but with enormous capacity to absorb all your attention,” said Olof Ramström, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, who told journalists gathered for the announcement about the chemistry behind MOFs.

MOFs have Tinkertoy-like structures where the joints are metal ions or clusters, and the struts are organic molecules. Their structure means that a sugar cube–size MOF, if laid flat, would cover an area the size of a football field.

By modifying the organic and inorganic components, and by tacking on other molecules to the MOF structures, researchers can create an endless variety of MOFs. Over 100,000 structures have already been made, and many more are predicted.

The porosity, stability, and versatility of the materials have allowed researchers to craft MOFs that can harvest moisture from dry desert air, capture carbon dioxide from flue gases or directly from air, store hydrogen gas, and remove per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other contaminants from water. Companies are also interested in using MOFs as battery separator and electrode materials and as catalysts for chemical synthesis.

At their essence, MOFs exemplify the power of combining organic and inorganic chemistry. But connecting organic and inorganic building blocks into well-ordered structures was a challenge for years. In the late 1980s, Robson, at the University of Melbourne, inspired by diamond’s structure, found that it was possible to make such constructs using copper ions connected with tetrahedral nitrile molecules. The structures were porous and ordered but were flimsy and collapsed easily.

Kitagawa at Kyoto University and Yaghi at the University of California, Berkeley, devised ways to make architecturally robust frameworks, which opened up practical uses. By combining various organic and inorganic components, Kitagawa in the early 1990s designed complex MOF constructs that were stable enough to take up and release gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, and methane. He also predicted that it was possible to make flexible MOFs.

Yaghi at the same time had also been working on making stable MOFs. In 1995, he reported the synthesis of the first MOF in which metal ions are joined by charged carboxylates linkers. Using his synthesis approach, which he has dubbed “reticular chemistry,” Yaghi has made MOFs with the largest pores yet, and he has also stitched together organic molecules with covalent bonds to make covalent organic frameworks (COFs). And he has been instrumental in getting MOFs out of the laboratory: his lab has spun off companies to commercialize the technology, for example to harvest potable water from air in arid environments.

But it is not just Yaghi who has commercialized MOFs. Numat is a company that has been developing MOFs for industrial applications for 12 years. The company’s CEO, Ben Hernandez, says MOFs “are really programmable materials that we can design, almost like software, for very different targeted applications that span everything from addressing global challenges and climate all the way to how we manufacture the semiconductor chips that go into everyday products.”

Hernandez calls the field of MOFs an entirely new area of chemistry that comes along only once in a generation. “This field of chemistry is, in many ways, not only new and novel, but the potential to profoundly impact so many diverse fields of industry is truly unique,” he says. Even if people haven’t heard about MOFs, he says, their impact will only grow in the coming years. “I think that’s really exciting and unique for this year’s recognition.” 

Mircea Dincă, professor of chemistry at Princeton University, says this is a “quintessential” materials chemistry prize that was a long time coming. “I think you have to sort of have lived under a rock to not have heard the term MOF, if you’re a chemist,” he says. “Some of the biggest, most energy intensive, most costly industrial processes are likely to benefit from MOFs.”

Dorothy Phillips, president of the American Chemical Society, says the award “highlights chemistry’s greatest strength: the ability to design and build molecular structures.” She also says that “there’s a real takeaway in terms of collaborative work over a period of time that leads to this type of recognition, because it didn’t all happen at once.” ACS publishes C&EN.

Hans Ellegren of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners this morning in Stockholm. The trio will each get one-third of the 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million) prize. Unlike with some of the other science prizes this week, all three chemistry Nobel laureates were reached before the news was made public.

With additional reporting by Brianna Barbu, Bethany Halford and Chris Gorski.

UPDATE:

This story was updated Oct. 8 to add information about the prize-winning research and quotes from Mircea Dincă, Ben Hernandez, Dorothy Phillips, and Olof Ramström.

Prachi Patel Prachi Patel is a physical sciences reporter at C&EN. Prachi joined the C&EN staff in 2023 after freelancing for over a dozen outlets for nearly 20 years. She writes about energy, environment, and materials from her home office and local coffee shops in Pittsburgh. Prachi grew up in India, where she studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate before transferring to Lehigh University. She holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. When she’s not at her desk, she’s shuttling her kids, walking her dogs, running, organizing community events, or watering her (too many) plants.

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