The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at this time awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry to former Arizona State University Assistant Professor Omar Yaghi for his breakthrough discoveries that established a brand new discipline referred to as reticular chemistry.
“It’s the very first time a Nobel Prize in chemistry has been bestowed for discoveries made in half in Arizona, for actually breakthrough work first carried out proper right here, in the labs at ASU,” ASU President Michael Crow said. “This Nobel Prize honor marks an historic, international scientific day of achievement, recognition and pride for ASU.”
Yaghi shared the Nobel Prize with fellow awardees Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson for the development of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, which contain large, porous holes to store and release all kinds of molecules.
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First reactions: Omar Yaghi, 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry
“Based on their groundbreaking discoveries, the true excitement is that, we, as a society, are now just beginning to see the innovative applications based on their work,” Crow said. “Their successes could pave the way to changing our society from a fossil fuel-driven economy to a hydrogen economy by the more efficient storage of gases, help us harvest more water for a thirsty world or even remove excess carbon from Earth’s atmosphere.”
Yaghi, now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, made his discoveries by first teaming up with Professor Michael O’ Keeffe at ASU in the Nineties.
They have been the primary to design and take advantage of steady sequence of MOFs at the time. The MOFs Yaghi synthesized together with his graduate college students in the Goldwater Center constructing have been porous crystals, strongly bonded and steady, with a novel design of atoms that may be organized in exact geometries to behave like molecular sponges.
“This is an extraordinary achievement,” mentioned Professor Neal Woodbury, vp and chief science and expertise officer for ASU’s Knowledge Enterprise. “When I first came to ASU in 1988, I had the privilege of witnessing the ASU team’s discoveries firsthand as they set about their groundbreaking work on the fundamental structure and properties of new molecules and materials. MOFs are exquisitely designed and elegant molecules that, despite their small size, when put together, have remarkable powers and potential to now help mitigate the effects of climate change.”
Part of a homegrown Nobel for ASU
Yaghi, who was an assistant professor at ASU from 1992–98, was a grasp in chemical synthesis and rising crystals. More than 30 years in the past, he and O’Keeffe launched into a quest to upend the bounds of chemistry at the time.
Yaghi was a younger, ebullient assistant professor. O’Keeffe, now a 91-year-old professor emeritus who nonetheless stays lively in his discipline, spent his total educational profession at ASU.
One day, Yaghi sat down in O’Keeffe’s workplace in what was then the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The reserved, England-native O’Keeffe requested him if he may synthesize a very lovely, complicated crystal in his lab.
Yaghi brashly replied, “Of course!”
And so started the sector now referred to as reticular chemistry.
Yet there have been many doubters at the start.
O’Keeffe defined: “Those who went to conferences the place such supplies have been mentioned three many years in the past heard the refrain: ‘They gained’t be steady.’ They have been. ‘The frameworks will collapse when solvent is eliminated.’ They didn’t. ‘They gained’t be porous.’ They have been — they adsorbed gases at low pressures and had ‘everlasting’ porosity.”
This porosity — a giant opening in the center of a MOF construction — was sometimes full of a placeholder of a yellow balloon (their inspiration was the ASU solar emblem at the time) to indicate the dimensions of a molecule that would match throughout the area. These yellow, space-filling balloons turned an indicator of their MOF designs.
The pair had invented a brand new crystal chemistry of steady and very porous MOFs.
And quickly, they shortly proved the naysayers improper, with one construction in specific: MOF-5, which attracted worldwide consideration in its capacity to carry gases. It earned O’Keeffe, Yaghi and coworkers a publication in Nature, and altered every thing. This demonstrated to the scientific neighborhood that MOFs had actually unprecedented floor space, porosity and stability.
“A chemist can twist around an atom in a molecule from being a poison to a medicine,” mentioned Yaghi in a YouTube video. “It’s that type of control that you want to have on this hidden world to allow you to do beneficial things. MOFs are porous crystals, or porous sponges, and the first wave of applications deals with the storage of gases. There is a lot of interest because MOFs are easy to make, and they can be scaled up to make in multi-ton quantities.”
A generational affect on society
Today, scientists are forming startup firms to discover industrial functions, or attempting to include 3D printer manufacturing applied sciences for MOFs.
Since their first discoveries and landmark Nature publication, Yaghi and O’Keeffe each ranked throughout the high 5 most-cited chemists in the world between 2000 and 2010, displaying their affect among the many scientific neighborhood.
In a precursor to Yaghi profitable the 2025 Nobel Prize, Yaghi and O’Keeffe were awarded the Aminoff Prize in 2018 from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in recognition of their achievements.
Based on their ingenuity, there are now a whole lot of 1000’s of MOF buildings which have been produced, every with a brand new variation on their basic themes.
For extra information on the official announcement, visit the Nobel Prize website.