Article by Katharine Sanderson, published in Nature magazine on July 9, 2025.
Prof. Omar Yaghi Featured in Nature Magazine
In July 2025, Prof. Omar Yaghi, the father of reticular chemisty and founder of Atoco, was featured in an article in Nature. The piece is diving into the huge potential of reticular materials in the context of various application areas, including carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting.
MOFs are structured like molecular scaffolding, containing vast caverns of internal space — they are the world’s most porous solid materials. One gram of MOF powder can have an internal surface area the size of a football field.
Over the past three decades, research chemists have created more than 100,000 MOF varieties in the laboratory, and have tested the powders’ capacity to store gases, act as catalysts, trap toxic chemicals from water and deliver drugs, among many other potential uses. Scientists have also created related materials called covalent organic frameworks, or COFs. But despite huge academic interest, chemists have not managed to turn the materials into industrial-scale products.
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In the mid-1990s, Omar Yaghi, a chemist now at the University of California, Berkeley, popularized the term MOF. Some initial structures were not stable or worked only at very low temperatures, but Yaghi developed methods to make MOFs more robust, constructing them from molecular building blocks linked through strong bonds. Academic labs leapt on the idea; more than 100,000 variants of MOFs are now recorded in the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, a facility that collates structural data for molecules. And there are more than 100,000 academic papers about the materials, according to Nature’s analysis (see ‘Papers on metal–organic frameworks’).