The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi for their work in the development of metal-organic frameworks.

The three scientists, who won the award on Wednesday, come from the universities of Kyoto in Japan, Melbourne in Australia and Berkeley in the United States, respectively.

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The three have created “molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow”, read a statement from the Nobel Prize. Such constructions can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyse chemical reactions, it added.

“Metal-organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

The 2024 prize was awarded to David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory based in London.

The three were awarded for discovering powerful techniques to decode and design novel proteins, the building blocks of life. Their work used advanced technologies, including AI, and can potentially transform how new drugs and other materials are made.