Chemistry Nobel| Solids full of holes: Crux of a Nobel find

Researchers have used metal-organic frameworks to harvest water from desert air, but that is by no means their only use.

It is like piecing together a Lego structure, but with molecular components. Metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, the subject of the research behind this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry, are a class of materials built with clusters of metal ions, connected through organic linkers — and with vast, useful spaces in between.

A screen displays the 2025 Nobel Prize laureates in Chemistry, Susumu Kitagawa (Kyoto University, Japan), Richard Robson (University of Melbourne, Australia), and Omar M. Yaghi (University of California, Berkeley, U.S.), as they are announced during a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. (REUTERS)

A real-estate agent, for example, may describe one kind of MOF as “an attractive and very spacious studio apartment, specifically designed for your life as a water molecule”, the