by Wayne Decatur
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for studies of metal-organic frameworks. The building blocks of metal-organic frameworks turned out to form networks with large cavities and the resulting class of materials have a wide range of far-reaching practical applications. The structure of cubic diamond lattice metal-organic framework is a landmark for the fact it showed validated the concept when the general expectation was the generated product would more likely yield an amorphous, relatively heterogeneous structure or a highly interpenetrated, cavity-less structure.