Structures that work like Hermione’s magic handbag land a chemistry Nobel

Designing a new class of versatile metal-and-carbon molecules has earned three scientists the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Think of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, as honeycombs or cages. Inside are big cavities. Based on how they’re built, MOFs can collect — and later release — any of a broad range of useful chemicals, sometimes in huge amounts.

Olof Ramström is a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. He likened MOFs to Hermione’s charmed handbag in the Harry Potter series. They’re “small on the outside but very, very large on the inside,” he noted Oct. 8. It was during an announcement of this year’s award by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Some MOFs can pull water from desert air, then later release it for drinking. Others can absorb harmful wavelengths of light so that they won’t injure crop plants. Some MOFs can be filled with a chemical that will break down pollutants that they contact. Engineers are already looking at ways to build such MOFs into clothing as a protective shield against certain toxic chemicals. MOFs can capture greenhouse gases like the carbon dioxide expelled from many industrial plants. They even can extract forever chemicals known as PFAS from water.

The list of what MOFs can do, Ramström said, just “goes on and on and on.”

This year’s award “highlights chemistry’s greatest strength — the ability to design and build molecular structures that address global problems,” says Dorothy J. Phillips. She’s president of the American Chemical Society.

The long road to this award

It all started in the late 1980s. Back then, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne in Australia figured out that combining copper ions with organic — or carbon-based — compounds created a crystal-like molecular structure. It looked similar to that of a diamond.

But this new material was different. Unlike a diamond’s molecules, which pack together densely, Robson’s new structure was full of holes. And those holes would turn out to be very, very useful. 

A few years later, Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University in Japan began creating new MOFs. Eventually, his team found one that could take up gases like methane, nitrogen and oxygen.

Around the same time, Omar Yaghi at the University of California, Berkeley, also began combining metal ions and organic molecules. By 1999, he had created a highly stable combo. Called MOF-5, it had an enormous surface area. Just a few grams, about the amount in a sugar cube, contained as much surface area as a soccer field.

Such a material could be used to sponge up large amounts of gas, Ramström notes.

Yaghi first heard about his win at an airport. While collecting his luggage, his phone buzzed. The call was from Sweden. “It was absolutely thrilling,” he said at a news conference. His phone hasn’t stopped ringing since, he added.

Yaghi, whose parents were Palestinian refugees, came to the United States from Jordan as a teenager. He credits U.S. public schools for his success. It “takes people like me with a major disadvantaged background — a refugee background — and allows you to … work hard and distinguish yourself.”

Robson, Kitagawa and Yaghi will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor (more than $1.1 million).