Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025: Metal-Organic Frameworks And Their Laureates

This note covers the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025: who won it, what metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are, how three chemists built them step by step from 1989 onwards, how the discovery unfolded over three decades, why these "holey materials" matter for water, gases and pollution, and quick facts for exams.

What was the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 awarded for?

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize jointly to three chemists with the citation: "for the development of metal–organic frameworks".

In plain words, the laureates worked out how to build molecular cages with large empty spaces inside them, using metal ions joined by carbon-based molecules. Chemists call these cages metal-organic frameworks, usually shortened to MOFs.

The metal ions act as fixed cornerstones, and long organic molecules called linkers connect them, so that the whole structure arranges itself into an ordered crystal with built-in gaps rather than a solid lump.

These spaces, or cavities, can hold gases, water vapour or pollutants, and the material can release them again later without falling apart. By choosing different metal ions and different linker molecules, chemists can tune the size and chemical character of the cavities to suit a particular job. The official name of the prize is the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Nobel Committee for Chemistry, through its chair Heiner Linke, said that "Metal–organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions". The press release also described the resulting constructions as containing "rooms for chemistry", a way of picturing the crystal's internal cavities as usable spaces.

Who are the laureates?

Susumu Kitagawa

Susumu Kitagawa was born on 4 July 1951 in Kyoto, Japan. At the time of the award he was a professor at Kyoto University, Japan, and he received one third of the prize.

He showed in 1997 that gases could flow in and out of these porous crystals without breaking them, and in 1998 he predicted that such frameworks could be made flexible, able to change shape as substances entered or left them.

Richard Robson

Richard Robson was born on 4 June 1937 in Glusburn, United Kingdom. At the time of the award he was a professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and he received one third of the prize.

In 1989 he combined copper ions with a four-armed carbon-based molecule to make the very first metal-organic framework, a crystal full of regular cavities, though his early versions were unstable and collapsed easily.

Omar M. Yaghi

Omar M. Yaghi was born on 9 February 1965 in Amman, Jordan. At the time of the award he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and he received one third of the prize.

Between 1995 and 2003 he coined the term "metal–organic framework", built the famously stable and spacious material called MOF-5, and showed that the building blocks could be rationally varied to tune the material's properties.

What problem were these chemists trying to solve?

Chemists had long been good at building single, discrete molecules, almost any shape a skilled experimentalist wanted. But building extended structures in two or three dimensions, with a predictable shape and useful internal spaces, was far harder.

One Nobel laureate in chemistry, Roald Hoffmann, is quoted in the scientific background as having called this area a "synthetic wasteland" because so little reliable progress had been made there before the 1990s.

Chemists already knew of some materials with useful cavities, such as zeolites, hard mineral structures built from silicon dioxide that could absorb gases.

They also knew of older examples, such as the pigment Prussian blue, whose cube-shaped framework held water molecules and cyanide ions in its gaps, though its structure was only understood long after it was discovered.

What chemists lacked was a reliable, deliberate method to design new cavity-containing crystals to order, choosing which molecules go where and what the finished cavity will hold.

This is the background against which Robson, Kitagawa and Yaghi worked. Their shared goal, pursued independently over roughly fifteen years, was to turn the construction of porous crystals from guesswork into a rational design process that any chemist could follow and adapt.

How does a metal-organic framework actually work?

A metal-organic framework is built from two kinds of building block that snap together by coordination chemistry, the attraction between a positively charged metal ion and a molecule that has a chemical group able to grip onto it. This branch of chemistry traces back to Alfred Werner, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1913 for working out how metal ions bond to surrounding molecules in fixed geometric patterns.

1. Choose a metal ion as the "cornerstone", for example a copper, zinc or cobalt ion, which prefers to be surrounded by a fixed number of other atoms arranged in a particular geometry.
2. Choose an organic linker, a longer carbon-based molecule with two or more "arms", each ending in a chemical group (such as a nitrile or a carboxylic acid group) that is attracted to the chosen metal ion.
3. Let the two building blocks combine. Because each metal ion wants a set number of linker arms around it, and each linker arm reaches for a metal ion, the pieces snap together into a repeating, highly ordered three-dimensional pattern instead of a disorganised tangle.
4. A crystal forms with large cavities built in, because the rigid metal-linker geometry leaves regular gaps between the connected units, rather like a diamond's atomic lattice but opened up into much bigger spaces.
5. Tune the cavity by swapping the metal ion or lengthening or shortening the linker molecule, which changes the size, shape and chemical character of the internal spaces without changing the overall repeating pattern.

Draw a small ball labelled "metal ion" (for example copper) at each corner of a cube-like pattern.

From each ball, draw four lines going outward representing the "arms" of an organic linker molecule, each arm ending in a small label such as "nitrile group".

Connect the arms to neighbouring metal ions so the whole drawing forms a repeating, open, cage-like lattice with a clearly empty space drawn in the middle of each cell, to show the cavity where gas or water molecules can sit.

How did Kitagawa and Yaghi make the frameworks useful?

Robson's original 1989 framework proved the idea worked but was fragile: once the solvent filling its cavities was removed, the structure often collapsed. Turning this fragile curiosity into a useful, stable material took the separate efforts of Kitagawa and Yaghi between 1992 and 2003.

Susumu Kitagawa's key insight, in 1997, was that a correctly built framework could be emptied and refilled with gas repeatedly without losing its shape.

His three-dimensional framework, made from cobalt, nickel or zinc ions linked by a molecule called 4,4′-bipyridine, could absorb and release methane, nitrogen and oxygen gas while staying intact.

A year later he proposed that frameworks could also be made flexible, changing shape slightly as they filled and emptied, like a material that can breathe, filling and emptying like a lung.

Omar Yaghi's contribution was to make frameworks both very stable and chemically adjustable. In 1999 he built MOF-5, a cube-shaped framework so robust that it could be heated to 300°C while empty without collapsing, and so spacious that just a couple of grams could contain a surface area as large as a football pitch.

Between 2002 and 2003 Yaghi showed that swapping the linker molecule for longer or shorter versions produced a whole family of related frameworks with cavities of different sizes, a method the press materials describe as rational design.

How did the discovery unfold?

Why does metal-organic framework research matter?

Once Kitagawa and Yaghi had shown that these frameworks could be made stable and tunable, chemists worldwide began building on the idea. The press release notes that "chemists have built tens of thousands of different MOFs" since the laureates' breakthroughs.

Real applications described in the sources include harvesting drinking water from desert air using MOF-303, which captures water vapour overnight and releases it when the sun heats the material;

capturing carbon dioxide from factories and power stations, including the CALF-20 framework being tested in a Canadian factory; and storing toxic or explosive gases, such as the gases used by the electronics industry to make semiconductors, inside safer, lower-pressure cavities.

Other named uses include removing PFAS pollutants from water using a framework called UiO-67, breaking down traces of antibiotics or crude oil residues in polluted water using a large-cavity framework called MIL-101, and experimental use of a framework called ZIF-8 for mining rare-earth elements from wastewater.

Some researchers quoted in the materials believe MOFs could become "the material of the twenty-first century", though the scientific background notes that most of these uses are so far only at small scale, with industry now working to scale production up.

What open questions remain for metal-organic frameworks?

Although tens of thousands of frameworks now exist, the scientific background describes most applications as still operating "on a small scale", meaning the step from laboratory demonstration to large, cheap, everyday industrial use is still being worked out for most of them.

Companies are investing in making MOF production cost-effective and scalable, and in combining MOFs with other materials to form composite structures with enhanced performance.

Chemists are increasingly using AI-based design alongside traditional rational design to work out which metal ion and linker combination will give a wanted cavity size or function, since the number of possible combinations is enormous.

A further open question is durability under real-world conditions: frameworks need to survive repeated filling and emptying, moisture, heat and mechanical stress over years of industrial use, not just in a controlled laboratory.

The sources describe continuing work to improve the stability, chemical resistance and recyclability of frameworks so that the laboratory successes translate into dependable products for water, energy and pollution-control use.

How does this connect to what you study?

Metal-organic frameworks build directly on ideas taught in school chemistry about coordination compounds, where a metal ion forms bonds with surrounding molecules or ions called ligands.

Alfred Werner, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1913, laid the foundation of this coordination chemistry decades before MOFs were invented.

The idea of a crystal lattice with a repeating unit, familiar from studying structures such as diamond or sodium chloride, also appears here: Robson's first framework was explicitly modelled on the diamond structure, just using copper ions and a four-armed molecule instead of carbon atoms.

Topics such as porosity, surface area and gas adsorption, often introduced through zeolites in school chemistry, are the same ideas used to describe why MOFs can store so much gas in so little material.

Chemists had long been skilled at building single, separate molecules almost any shape they wanted. But building extended structures stretching across two or three dimensions, with a predictable shape and useful internal spaces, proved far harder to control.

The scientific background quotes chemistry laureate Roald Hoffmann as having called this area a "synthetic wasteland" before the 1990s, because so little reliable progress had been made in building ordered, three-dimensional structures by design rather than by accident.

Even predicting what shape a crystal would take from its ingredients was considered extremely hard: a commentator quoted in the background called it "one of the continuing scandals" of the physical sciences that scientists could not foresee how simple building blocks would come together into a solid.

Chemists already knew some materials with useful cavities, such as zeolites, hard mineral structures built from silicon dioxide that could absorb gases and were already used in industry. They also knew of older examples such as the pigment Prussian blue, whose cube-shaped framework trapped water molecules and cyanide ions in its gaps, though its structure was understood only long after it was first made.

What chemists lacked was a reliable, deliberate method to design new cavity-containing crystals to order, choosing in advance which molecules go where and what the finished cavity will hold. This is the background against which Robson, Kitagawa and Yaghi worked over roughly fifteen years, turning porous crystal-building from guesswork into a repeatable design process.

Quick facts for exams

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 was awarded jointly to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi "for the development of metal–organic frameworks", announced on 8 October 2025 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Each laureate received one third of the prize, which totalled 11,000,000 Swedish kronor. Kitagawa was born in Kyoto, Japan, and was affiliated with Kyoto University;

Robson was born in Glusburn, United Kingdom, and was affiliated with the University of Melbourne, Australia; Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, and was affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

The work concerns metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), porous crystals built from metal ions joined by organic molecules, with uses including water harvesting, gas storage and carbon capture.

Note: Source. The prize facts in this note are from the Nobel Prize's official site, nobelprize.org.

Glossary

• Metal-organic framework (MOF) — a crystal built from metal ions linked by organic (carbon-based) molecules, containing built-in cavities.
• Coordination chemistry — the study of how metal ions bond to surrounding molecules or ions, called ligands, in a fixed geometric arrangement.
• Linker — the organic molecule, often with two or more "arms", that connects metal ions together in a framework.
• Cavity — an empty space built into a crystal structure, able to hold other molecules such as gases or water.
• Porous material — a solid containing many small holes or channels through which substances can pass.
• Zeolite — a porous mineral made of silicon dioxide, used before MOFs to absorb gases.
• Nitrile group — a chemical group used in Robson's linker molecule that is attracted to copper ions.
• Rational design — deliberately choosing building blocks to give a material predictable, wanted properties, rather than relying on trial and error.
• Isoreticular chemistry — Yaghi's method of keeping the same basic crystal pattern while varying the linker to change cavity size.
• Flexible (soft) framework — a MOF that changes shape slightly as it fills with or releases guest molecules.
• Carbon capture — removing carbon dioxide gas from factory or power station emissions, one proposed use of MOFs such as CALF-20.
• PFAS — a group of persistent water pollutants that some MOFs, such as UiO-67, can remove from water.

Common errors and misconceptions

• Misconception: MOFs are a new kind of metal alloy. Correct: MOFs are crystals built from metal ions joined by organic carbon-based molecules, not a metal mixture.
• Misconception: Richard Robson alone created the whole field of MOFs. Correct: Robson made the first framework in 1989, but it was unstable; Kitagawa and Yaghi separately made frameworks stable, flexible and tunable between 1992 and 2003.
• Misconception: MOFs and zeolites are the same thing. Correct: Zeolites are hard, silicon dioxide-based porous minerals, while MOFs are built from metal ions and organic linkers and can be made soft and flexible.
• Misconception: The prize was given for discovering one single useful MOF. Correct: The citation covers the broader development of metal-organic frameworks as a class of materials, not one product.
• Misconception: MOF-5 was the first metal-organic framework ever made. Correct: Robson's 1989 copper-nitrile framework came first; MOF-5, made by Yaghi in 1999, became famous for its exceptional stability and surface area.
• Misconception: MOF technology is already in widespread everyday use. Correct: Most MOF applications still operate on a small scale, with industry working to scale up production.

Exam-style questions with model answers

Q1. For what work was the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 awarded? [1 mark]

1. It was awarded "for the development of metal–organic frameworks".

Q2. Name the three laureates of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 and their share of the prize. [2 marks]

1. The three laureates were Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi.
2. Each of them received one third of the prize.

Q3. Explain what a metal-organic framework is and how its building blocks combine to form cavities. [4 marks]

1. A metal-organic framework is a porous crystal built from metal ions acting as cornerstones, linked by long organic (carbon-based) molecules called linkers.
2. Each metal ion prefers a fixed number of bonds in a particular geometry, and each linker molecule has arms ending in chemical groups attracted to that metal ion.
3. When combined, the metal ions and linkers snap together into a repeating, ordered three-dimensional pattern rather than a random tangle.
4. This rigid, repeating geometry leaves regular empty spaces, or cavities, built into the structure, which can be filled with gases, water or other small molecules and later released.

Q4. Describe Richard Robson's original 1989 contribution to metal-organic frameworks. [3 marks]

1. In 1989 Robson combined positively charged copper ions with a four-armed organic molecule whose arms each carried a chemical group attracted to copper.
2. These building blocks bonded together to form a well-ordered crystal resembling a diamond structure but filled with many large cavities.
3. Robson recognised the potential of this construction, but it was unstable and tended to collapse once the solvent inside it was removed.

Q5. Compare the key contributions of Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi to making metal-organic frameworks useful. [4 marks]

1. Kitagawa, in 1997, built a three-dimensional framework from cobalt, nickel or zinc ions and a bipyridine linker that could absorb and release gases such as methane, nitrogen and oxygen without collapsing.
2. In 1998 Kitagawa proposed that frameworks could be made flexible, changing shape as they filled and emptied, unlike rigid materials such as zeolites.
3. Yaghi, in 1999, built MOF-5, an extremely stable framework with a huge internal surface area, able to withstand heating to 300°C while empty.
4. Between 2002 and 2003 Yaghi showed that varying the linker molecule in a rational way produced whole families of related frameworks with different cavity sizes, a method called isoreticular chemistry.

Q6. List three real-world applications of metal-organic frameworks mentioned in the sources, with the named framework for each. [3 marks]

1. MOF-303 is used to harvest drinking water from desert air by capturing water vapour at night and releasing it when heated by the sun.
2. CALF-20 is being tested in a Canadian factory to capture carbon dioxide from industrial emissions.
3. UiO-67 is used to absorb PFAS pollutants from water for water treatment purposes.

Q7. Discuss how the development of metal-organic frameworks unfolded between 1974 and 2003, and explain why this progression mattered for the field of chemistry. [6 marks]

1. The story begins in 1974, when Richard Robson, while preparing wooden ball-and-rod molecular models for teaching, noticed that the positioning of drilled holes encoded a molecule's correct shape, which inspired his idea of linking whole molecules together using the inherent attraction between atoms.
2. In 1989 Robson tested this idea by combining copper ions with a four-armed nitrile-tipped molecule, producing the first metal-organic framework, a diamond-like crystal filled with large cavities, though it was fragile and collapsed easily once emptied of solvent.
3. From 1992, Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi worked separately to put this building method on a firmer foundation.
4. Kitagawa's 1997 framework showed that gases could be absorbed and released reversibly without the structure collapsing, and his 1998 proposal that frameworks could be made flexible opened the door to shape-changing "soft" materials.
5. Yaghi coined the term "metal–organic framework" in 1995, then in 1999 produced MOF-5, an exceptionally stable and spacious framework that became the benchmark for the whole field, and between 2002 and 2003 he showed that rationally varying the linker molecule could produce entire families of related frameworks with tuneable cavity sizes.
6. This thirty-year progression mattered because it turned the construction of porous crystals from unpredictable trial and error into a reliable, rational design process, allowing chemists worldwide to later build tens of thousands of different MOFs for uses ranging from water harvesting to carbon capture.

Key takeaways

• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 honoured Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi for developing metal-organic frameworks.
• A metal-organic framework is a porous crystal made of metal ions linked by organic molecules, with built-in cavities.
• Richard Robson built the first metal-organic framework in 1989, but it was unstable once emptied of solvent.
• Susumu Kitagawa showed in 1997 that frameworks could reversibly absorb and release gases, and in 1998 proposed flexible frameworks.
• Omar Yaghi coined the term "metal-organic framework" in 1995 and built the famously stable, spacious MOF-5 in 1999.
• Yaghi's rational and isoreticular design methods let chemists tune cavity size by changing the linker molecule.
• Named applications include harvesting water from desert air, capturing carbon dioxide, and removing PFAS from water.
• Most MOF applications currently operate at small scale, with industry working to make production cost-effective and scalable.

Test yourself

What phrase did the Nobel Committee use to describe metal-organic frameworks' potential?

They said MOFs bring "previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions".

Which laureate built the very first metal-organic framework, and in what year?

Richard Robson built the first metal-organic framework in 1989, using copper ions and a four-armed organic molecule.

What made MOF-5 so notable?

MOF-5, built by Omar Yaghi in 1999, was extremely stable even when heated to 300°C and had a huge internal surface area for its weight.

Name one gas or pollutant a named framework can capture or remove.

CALF-20 captures carbon dioxide; UiO-67 removes PFAS pollutants from water.

How did Kitagawa's 1998 idea change how chemists thought about frameworks?

He proposed that frameworks could be made flexible, changing shape as they filled or emptied, unlike rigid materials such as zeolites.

What was each laureate's share of the 11,000,000 Swedish kronor prize?

Each of the three laureates, Kitagawa, Robson and Yaghi, received one third of the prize.

Where were the three laureates affiliated at the time of the award?

Kitagawa at Kyoto University, Robson at the University of Melbourne, and Yaghi at the University of California, Berkeley.