The Nobel Committee has announced the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The award went to Kyoto University professor Susumu Kitagawa, University of Melbourne professor Richard Robson, and University of California, Berkeley professor Omar Yaghi. They were honored for developing metal-organic framework structures, or MOFs.
“By developing metal-organic structures, the laureates have given chemists new opportunities to address some of the challenges facing us,” the Nobel Committee said in its statement.
MOFs are three-dimensional porous frameworks made of metal nodes and organic ligands. Their large internal surface area allows them to hold gases and other substances, while their properties can be tuned by selecting different metals, ligands, and pore sizes.
Robson was the first to move toward the controlled synthesis of such structures. In 1974, while working at the University of Melbourne, he was building molecular models for students from wooden balls and arrived at the idea of using the geometry of chemical bonds to assemble large structures. In 1989, he described in the Journal of the American Chemical Society a crystalline molecular construction with large cavities and suggested that such materials could acquire useful properties.
Kitagawa advanced the field in the 1990s. In 1997, he created a MOF with open channels that could absorb and release methane, nitrogen, and oxygen without losing its structure, and later turned to flexible frameworks that change shape when filled or emptied.
In 1995, Yaghi introduced the term “metal-organic framework,” and in 1999 he presented the stable material MOF-5. According to the Nobel Committee, just a few grams of it provided an internal surface area comparable to a football field. His group later showed that MOFs can be tailored for different tasks, including methane storage and extracting water from desert air.
Today, MOFs are being considered for carbon dioxide capture, storage of toxic substances, drug delivery, and work with industrial gases. At the press conference after the prize announcement, Nobel Committee for Chemistry chair Heiner Linke said such frameworks open unprecedented possibilities for creating materials with new functions.