Reacción a "Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi for creating porous materials with blocks of molecules that capture substances and drive reactions "

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognises the work of Robson, Kitagawa and Yaghi in the development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). MOFs are a class of materials formed by the bonding of metal centres and organic molecules. One of the main characteristics of these materials is that they have structures with pores inside them, at the molecular and nanometric scale, which can be used to encapsulate other molecules, such as different gases. These materials can have immense specific surface areas, up to thousands of square metres per gram.

The Nobel Prize recognises Robson's pioneering work in the preparation of these materials, describing how they can be designed by selecting the appropriate chemical components to give them the desired geometric and topological characteristics. The work of Kitagawa and Yaghi demonstrated that the porosity of these materials can be effectively used to incorporate other molecules inside them, either to capture gases or to carry out chemical reactions with them, while maintaining the integrity of their structures, or even adapting to the presence of these guest molecules. Yaghi's pioneering work has also served to establish what is now known as reticular chemistry, which allows us to design materials based on their own structures, once the molecules that compose them join and link together to form networks.

MOFs are currently being researched in numerous fields, with applications such as carbon dioxide capture and gas storage, but above all, they have given chemists the tools to design and create materials, modulating and adjusting their composition and properties with atomic precision.