Nobel Prize Chemistry Enables Greener Synthesis

[ACSGCI]

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry—for the discovery and development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) by Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi—underscores just how central MOFs are to the ambitions of green chemistry: designing chemical processes that use renewable resources, reduce energy demands, minimize waste, and enable safer, more efficient reactions.

MOFs enable greener synthetic chemistry in a number of ways. For instance, recent work has shown MOFs facilitating:

• Direct C–H activation under mild conditions, using a robust pyrazolate MOF for selective bond transformations (ACS J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2024).
• Upcycling of polyethylene waste through MOF-derived catalysts that efficiently hydrogenolyze plastics into useful hydrocarbons (ACS Chem. Mater., 2024).
• Ruthenium-enriched 2D MOF catalysts for hydrogenation and transfer reactions, combining high activity with recyclability (ACS Catal., 2024).

Beyond synthetic catalysis, MOFs are already being applied in broader sustainability realms: harvesting water from desert air; capturing greenhouse gases like CO₂; removing pollutants (e.g. “forever chemicals”, toxic trace pharmaceuticals) from water; and enabling precise drug delivery systems with high loading capacity and controlled release.

Some recent examples from ACS publications:

• Water-Enhanced Direct Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide in Metal–Organic Frameworks(J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2024)— this paper describes amine-functionalized Zr-MOF-808 variants that maintain high CO₂ capture in the presence of water vapor, a key step toward real-world direct air capture. 
• Drug Delivery on Mg-MOF-74: The Effect of Drug Solubility on Pharmacokinetics (ACS Appl. Bio Mater. 2023) — shows how MOFs can act as tunable drug carriers, where the choice of drug (size, solubility) determines release rate and efficiency. 
• Accelerated Discovery of MOFs for CO₂ Capture by Artificial Intelligence (ACS Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research) — combining AI, modeling, and experiments to find MOFs with excellent CO₂/N₂ selectivity that hold up even in humid flue-gas conditions.

These breakthroughs showcase how materials innovation drives progress toward a more sustainable, circular chemical enterprise.

Catch up on the Nobel Prize announcement with C&EN, and look for future programming on MOFs at ACSSpring2026.