Trio wins chemistry Nobel for new form of molecular architecture

Stockholm: Japan s Susumu Kitagawa, UK born Richard Robson and American Jordanian Omar M. Yaghi on Wednesday won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for deve...

Stockholm: Japan's Susumu Kitagawa, UK-born Richard Robson and American-Jordanian Omar M. Yaghi on Wednesday won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing so-called metal-organic frameworks, the Nobel jury said.

"These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyse chemical reactions," the jury said.

Commentators have for years suggested Yaghi was a strong contender for the prize, with Kitagawa's name also often floated alongside his.

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

Last year, the chemistry prize went to Americans David Baker and John Jumper, together with Briton Demis Hassabis, for work on cracking the code of the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life, through computing and artificial intelligence.