Reticular materials

Reticular materials are artificial materials that have been engineered at the molecular level to achieve certain properties, in particular a high porosity and high surface area. Reticular materials can be grouped into three major classes, in the order of their discovery: metal-organic frameworks or MOFs, covalent organic frameworks or COFs, and hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks or HOFs, each with respective sub-classes. An example for a sub-class of MOFs are zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks (ZIFs).  

MOFs are the most explored sub-class of reticular materials (around 77% of the approximately 48,000 publications on reticular materials between the 1990s to 2023 were on MOFs). MOFs are a type (or subclass) of coordination polymers. Around 99 thousand synthetic variants of MOF are known. The structures and functionality of reticular materials, for example the pore size, are adjustable (or “tailorable”) during the synthesis process. This makes them in principle adjustable to many different technical requirements. Depending on the choice of materials and synthesis methods, reticular materials, because of the strong bonds, can be designed to withstand extreme temperatures and harsh chemical environments over extended periods of time.

This field was pioneered by Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi starting in the 1990s. These three scientists received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2025 “for the development of metal–organic frameworks”.

There are many potential applications for reticular materials, although only very few applications have reached a commercial level to date. The initial application of reticular materials was mostly for gas adsorption and storage, followed later by other fields such as catalysis, biomedicine, and membrane technologies. Examples for gas adsorption and storage technologies with reticular materials include carbon capture and storage, direct air capture, atmospheric water harvesting and hydrogen storage. These are all applications that several start-up or commercial companies are now pursuing. Other applications that are being researched, including for biomedicine and catalysis, are still in their infancy and emerging states. Research is ongoing around the world to take the most promising reticular materials into the full-scale commercialization process for real-world applications. Hindering factors include scalability, high costs of reticular materials, reproducibility and poor technology readiness level. The company BASF produces raw MOFs at commercial quantities.