Prelims: Current events of national and international importance | Awards
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 honors 3 scientists who expanded that horizon into a whole new dimension.
Awardees
Susumu Kitagawa,
Richard Robson and
Omar Yaghi
Given by - Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Prize money - The 3 winners will share prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor (£872,000).
Purpose - The scientists' work is about how molecules can be built together into structures - or Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs).
The scientists' work could tackle some of the biggest problems on our planet, including capturing carbon dioxide to help tackle climate change and reducing plastic pollution using chemistry.
Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs)
MOFs are crystalline structures in which metal ions serve as nodes and organic molecules as connectors.
The resulting structure can have enormous internal surface areas, thousands of square metres per gram and their pores can be customised to attract or hold specific molecules.
Chemists classify MOFs as part of a larger family called coordination networks but their hallmark is tuneable porosity.
By carefully choosing the building blocks, researchers can control the size and shape of the cavities and the chemical environment within.
As a result, MOFs are among the most versatile materials ever created.
They worked out how to build constructions with large spaces between the molecules, through which gases and other chemicals can flow.
These rooms can be used to capture and store chemicals that humans want to get rid of, including carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
