Rooms for Chemistry: The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
André FielickeABSTRACT
It is bigger from the inside! This description of the fictional space and time travel device of “The Doctor” from the BBC's TV series Doctor Who nearly perfectly fits the type of materials—metal‐organic frameworks, or in short, MOFs—whose development has been honored with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Although the inner volume of a solid box having walls of finite thickness will always be smaller than its outer volume, voids within carefully designed MOFs are able to capture multiple times more (gas) molecules per volume than empty space. Thus, a gas bottle already filled with MOFs can have a significantly higher storage capacity compared to an empty container. There is no magic in it, just ingenious molecular design. Welcome to the world of MOFs!
Key Points
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They developed the science of metal‐organic frameworks (MOFs) and opened up a new extremely variable structural chemistry. The modular construction principle of MOFs together with their highly porous structures allows the implementation of a wide range of functionalities (e.g., chemical, electronic, or magnetic), including even reversible structural changes of the framework.