Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have developed metal–organic frameworks that capture nearly four times as much carbon dioxide from ambient air by altering the twist of their molecular linkers, according to reporting published in Nature Materials.
Himan Dev Singh and Wendy L. Queen, based at EPFL’s Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering in Sion, constructed two distinct metal–organic frameworks using the same node. The two materials differ exclusively in the twist of their tritopic linkers.
This structural twist reorients the metal sites across the framework while leaving the material's fundamental chemistry, overall porosity, and network topology unchanged. The modification demonstrates that spatial confinement can be programmed directly by design. Between the two tested materials, the more confined framework captured nearly four times as much CO2 from ambient air without altering pore volume or node composition.
Singh and Queen declared no competing financial interests in the peer-reviewed study, which was published on August 19, 2026, under DOI 10.1038/s41563-026-02716-1. The authors contextualized their framework design against earlier literature spanning enzyme mechanics and materials science, citing studies by Kraut in 1977, Silverman and Lindskog in 1988, Fried, Bagchi, and Boxer in 2014, and Jiang, Alezi, and Eddaoudi in 2021.
The study also cites research by Bien, Liu, and Wade published in Chemistry of Materials in 2020, as well as 2026 framework findings by Tang and colleagues in Nature Materials.
