Reticular chemistry is currently a massive field: millions of new MOFs can still be made, and chemists are behaving a little like children in a candy shop.

One attractive idea is using MOFs to do what enzymes do when they speed up chemical reactions, a process called catalysis, which can help synthesise useful chemicals, such as in drug development. We have MOFs that can do what enzymes can do, but they could last and work for longer than enzymes. This is ripe to be exploited for biological applications, for therapeutics, in the next decade or so.

But I think the next-best use cases will come from “multivariate materials”, which is research that you don’t hear much about because it is only going on in my lab. Here, we want to make MOFs that don’t have the same structure through and through, but have massively different environments within them.

We can make them from different modules that are “decorated” with different compounds, so inside the material, there would be very different microenvironments that would make specific molecules do specific things. In experiments, we have already been able to leverage this to make materials that absorb gases more selectively and efficiently.

This is also a shift in chemists’ mindsets. Chemists are not used to thinking about making heterogeneous or uneven materials, but we want a very ordered skeleton for a material combined with very heterogeneous guts.