From making wine in Catalonia to obtaining water in the desert: the Nobel Prize honors the chemists who have revolutionized the creation of materials.

A new way of thinking about chemical design that has made it possible to manufacture tailor-made materials with unprecedented functions has been recognized with this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The laureates are Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University in Japan; Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne in Britain; and Omar M. Yaghi of Jordan at the University of California.

The three laureates contributed to the creation of a new chemical architecture that combines biological concepts such as molecular recognition within a stable, solid, and porous structure. This opens the door to applications as diverse as driving chemical reactions, storing gases, and capturing and destroying polluting compounds.

The structures they created, called metal-organic lattices or MOFs, contain large cavities through which molecules can enter and exit. This ability to select and store substances with such precision has enabled a wide range of applications, from extracting water from desert air to extracting pollutants from water and capturing carbon dioxide.

In fact, this is precisely what the verdict of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which grants this award, highlights: the recognition is motivated by the discovery of metal-organic frameworks, which "have enormous potential and offer previously unthinkable opportunities to create tailor-made materials with new functions."

David Fairén-Jiménez, professor of molecular engineering at the University of Cambridge, tells SMC Spain that "their discovery opened up a new universe of possibilities in energy, the environment, and health and will continue to inspire generations of scientists for decades."

"These researchers have been among the favorites to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for more than 10 years," ICREA researcher JR. Galán Mascarós, principal investigator at the Catalan Institute of Chemical Research (ICIQ), told ARA. Galán highlights the enormous versatility of the materials that can be created from these metal-organic networks, "from destroying poisons and toxic gases in military applications to decontaminating water."

An intuition from a wooden game

It all began in 1974, when Richard Robson was teaching at the University of Melbourne, Australia. To prepare a session on what we would now call manipulative chemistry, he asked the university workshop to drill holes in wooden balls where he wanted to embed bars of the same material, which would recreate chemical bonds and thus connect. It was like a kind of wooden Lego. Robson marked the exact location on the balls where the holes should be made. And when the workshop returned the balls to him, he had a revelation: the position of the holes was key to giving the molecules the right shape and structure.

He spent ten years mulling over that idea until he decided to start working with a simple model inspired by the structure of diamond, where each carbon atom bonds with four other atoms to form a small pyramid. However, the structure he achieved was unstable. And this is where Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi come into play, providing a solid foundation for this method. Together they created the first MOFs and demonstrated their potential.

Wines with Nobel Prize material

The work of these three researchers has enabled laboratories around the world to develop applications based on these MOFs to administer drugs or release RNA into a tumor, as well as manage extremely toxic gases.

Also to trap gases such as CO₂. This is what a group of researchers at ICIQ, led by JR Galán-Mascarós, has done: they have created the start-up Orchestra Sci which uses a MOF material that separates CO₂ from any gas and purifies it. The product is now being scaled up, and its applications include "filtering CO₂ from chimneys or other emission sources." "Not only do we avoid emitting greenhouse gases, but we can also collect this carbon dioxide and reuse it as raw material to make polymers, for example," explains Galán Mascarós.

One example is the project with Celler Torres. "They emit CO₂ from the fermentation of must and must purchase CO₂ for various winemaking processes," explains the ICIQ researcher. What they do is capture the CO₂ from fermentation with a MOF material and purify it so it can be reused for injection into wines. "In this way, we are committed to a circular economy," notes Galán Mascarós.

Three Nobel Prizes still to be awarded.

Last year the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded the protein decodersIt was a collective recognition of three researchers for their contributions to the development and understanding of proteins, authentic engineering pieces for creating life, which until relatively recently were unknown to the scientific community. The award went to David Baker, director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, "for having designed proteins using computational tools," and to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, "for making protein structure prediction possible."

The award will be presented at a ceremony on December 10 in Stockholm, Sweden, coinciding with the death date of Alfred Nobel, the instigator of the prizes. It is endowed with 11 million Swedish kronor (about 934,243 euros), following the guidelines that the prize's creator, Alfred Nobel, left in writing in 1895, a year before his death. At that time, he set the prize at 31 million Swedish kronor, a figure that has evolved according to the fluctuation in the value of the currency. The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1901 to the Dutchman Jacobus Hendricus van Hoff for having discovered the so-called laws of chemical kinetics, as well as the laws that govern the osmotic pressure of solutions.

The Chemistry Prize is the third to be awarded this 2025, after On Monday the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to the discoverers of the police officers of the immune system to American immunologists Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and to Japanese Shimon Sakaguchi. And on Tuesday, in the framework of the International Year of Quantum Physics, the Nobel Prize in Physics to the discoverers of quantum mechanics in action within a chip, Americans Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis. In the coming days, it will be the turn of the literature, peace, and economics awards.

Since the awards began, 116 chemistry prizes have been awarded.