Nobel prize in chemistry awarded for work on molecular architecture

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi for the development of cavity-filled materials capable of storing and releasing gases such as carbon dioxide, called metal-organic structures.

“A small amount of this type of material can almost look like Hermione’s handbag in Harry Potter“, said Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “It can store enormous quantities of gas in a tiny volume.”

Tens of thousands of different metal-organic structures have now been created. They have many potential applications, ranging from CO capture₂ in chimneys to forever clean chemicals and collect water from the air.

In the late 1980s, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne in Australia was inspired by the ordered structure of diamonds to create the first metal-organic structures. Robson realized that it might be possible to use metal ions as nodes and link them together with carbon-based or organic molecules.

When metal ions and organic molecules are mixed, they self-assemble into ordered structures. While the cavities in the diamond framework are small, the cavities in the metal-organic frameworks can be much larger.

The cavities of the metal-organic structures created by Robson were filled with water. It was Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University in Japan who was the first to create a framework stable enough to be dried and successfully filled the empty cavities with gas.

“He showed that gases could be captured, absorbed by the material, and could also be released from the material,” said Olof Ramström, a member of the Nobel committee for chemistry.

Kitagawa also created metal-organic structures that change shape when gases are added or removed.

Omar Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley, managed to create even more stable structures using metal ion clusters containing zinc and oxygen, as well as linkers containing carboxylate groups.

“It’s an amazing frame because it was very stable. It was stable up to 300 degrees Celsius,” Ramström said. “But what is even more remarkable is that it contains an enormous surface area. So just a few grams of this porous material, roughly the equivalent of a small piece of sugar, contains as much surface area as a large football field that is several thousand square meters.”

Yaghi also showed that the cavities in these materials can be enlarged, simply by lengthening the linkers.

After these fundamental advances, the field evolved very quickly, Ramström said. “We see new metal-organic frameworks developed almost every day.”