Metal-organic frameworks, commonly abbreviated as MOFs, are built from metal atoms or clusters connected by organic molecules into highly ordered, repeating lattices. The geometry of these connections produces structures riddled with pores measured in fractions of a nanometre, giving MOFs an enormous internal surface area relative to their mass. That porosity is the key structural feature that creates the internal space necessary for MOFs to interact with target molecules, which is why the materials are under intense investigation for applications ranging from gas storage and separation to sensing, catalysis, bio-imaging, and magnetic materials. Because both the metal nodes and the organic linkers can be varied, MOFs have long been regarded as among the most customisable classes of solid materials in modern chemistry.

The new material, designated UoB-116, belongs to a subset of the MOF family built around rare-earth metals. In the first stage of the study, the researchers created and structurally characterised fifteen individual versions of the framework, each incorporating a different rare-earth metal. This step established that the underlying structure was robust enough to accommodate a wide range of metal ions without collapsing or losing its crystalline order. The team then moved to progressively more complex compositions, combining two, four, twelve, and finally fifteen different metals within the same framework, demonstrating at each stage that the crystal retained its ordered architecture.

The final and most striking step was the addition of indium, a metal drawn from outside the rare-earth family. The resulting MOF contained sixteen different metals simultaneously: yttrium, indium, and fourteen of the lanthanides. According to the researchers, UoB-116 is the first reported MOF to combine metals drawn from three different regions of the periodic table — the d-block, the p-block, and the f-block — within a single framework. That breadth of chemical compatibility is what gives the material its mix-and-match character, allowing elements with very different electronic structures to sit side by side in one ordered lattice.

To show that this compositional freedom translates into functional control, the team focused on two of the sixteen metals, dysprosium and lanthanum, and systematically varied the balance between them. The results were unambiguous. Increasing the dysprosium content increased the material’s magnetic response, while the characteristic near-infrared light absorption associated with dysprosium could be adjusted simply by altering its concentration. Porosity responded in the opposite direction: adding more lanthanum progressively reduced the material’s measured surface area. Most dramatically, the amount of carbon dioxide the material could take up under the conditions tested fell from 5.72 millimoles per gram for the all-dysprosium version to 1.23 millimoles per gram for the all-lanthanum version — a demonstration that gas-storage behaviour can be changed by adjusting the metals alone, with no change to the framework’s underlying architecture.

Corresponding author Professor Neil Champness of the University of Birmingham framed the advance as a step toward materials that behave almost like software. “Our findings confirm a route towards ‘programmable’ porous materials, where scientists could choose a combination of metals to dial magnetic, optical, chemical, or gas-adsorption behaviour,” he said. “The ability to predict how strongly particular metals will be incorporated potentially offers much finer control over future multi-metal materials. Rather than having to invent a completely new material every time they want different properties, researchers can potentially change the metallic ‘recipe’ within the same underlying structure.”

That question of predictability is central to why the work matters beyond its record-setting composition. In many multicomponent materials, different metal ions compete for the same structural sites in ways that are difficult to anticipate, and the final distribution of metals can be chaotic. The Birmingham-led team reports that the incorporation of particular metals into UoB-116 follows a bias linked to the radius of the cations, meaning that how strongly each metal is taken up into the framework can be predicted from its ionic size. If that predictive relationship holds across other metal combinations, it would give chemists a design rule for dialling in specific property profiles rather than discovering them by trial and error.

The practical stakes are considerable, because MOFs already serve as custom molecular sponges across several major industries. In clean energy, they are studied for compact hydrogen storage in fuel-cell vehicles and for selective carbon capture from industrial emissions. In environmental safety, related frameworks are being explored for harvesting drinkable water from arid air and for the safe storage of toxic gases used in semiconductor manufacturing. In industrial chemistry, energy-saving adsorptive separations based on MOFs could replace cryogenic distillation, one of the most energy-intensive unit operations in the chemical industry. In biomedicine, high-capacity frameworks are being developed for targeted drug delivery and as imaging contrast agents. A single tunable platform that can be re-optimised for each of these tasks by swapping metals could dramatically shorten development cycles.

The study, titled “Rare-Earth Multivariate Metal–Organic Frameworks: Cationic Radius Biased Compositional Control and Property Tuning,” was led by Adnan Ishaq and Professor Neil R. Champness at Birmingham, with contributions from Joseph O. Ogar, Asif Raza, Danielle E. Schier, Stephen P. Argent, Musa M. Mahmud, Lucy Clark, Jacob L. Brownlee, and Soumya Mukherjee across the collaborating institutions. The work appeared in Angewandte Chemie on 26 September 2026, and its publication marks one of the most extensive demonstrations yet of compositional control in a multivariate framework.

For the broader field of materials chemistry, UoB-116 offers a proof of concept that the boundary between designing new materials and tuning existing ones can be blurred. If the same principle — a robust framework that tolerates many metals in predictable proportions — can be extended to other linker chemistries and other metal families, the result could be a generation of porous materials whose properties are specified on demand: more magnetic here, more porous there, tuned for carbon capture or near-infrared optics by nothing more than a change in the recipe. For now, the sixteen-metal framework stands as evidence that the periodic table itself can be treated as a palette, and that the next breakthrough material may not need to be built from scratch at all.

Subject of Research: Multivariate rare-earth metal-organic frameworks with tunable properties through compositional control of incorporated metals

Article Title: ‘Mix-and-match’ material’s properties can be tuned by changing its metallic ‘recipe’

Article References: ‘Mix-and-match’ material’s properties can be tuned by changing its metallic ‘recipe’. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: metal-organic frameworks, MOFs, rare-earth metals, lanthanides, porous materials, gas storage, carbon capture, magnetism, light absorption, materials chemistry, University of Birmingham, Angewandte Chemie

The scale of the problem the material targets is considerable. Industrial activity, including the burning of fossil fuels for energy, accounts for a substantial share of the carbon dioxide accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere. In the United States alone, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that roughly 30 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions come from industry. Capturing carbon dioxide at the point where it enters the atmosphere, before it can disperse and contribute to global warming, is widely regarded as one of the more practical avenues for mitigating climate change, because point-source technologies are comparatively mature compared with the still-nascent field of direct air capture.

Metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, are the class of materials at the heart of the new study. They are crystalline solids built from positively charged metal ions surrounded by organic linker molecules known as ligands. The metal ions act as nodes that bind the arms of the linkers, assembling a repeating, cage-like architecture riddled with nanosized pores. Those pores behave something like a molecular sponge, adsorbing gas molecules onto their interior surfaces. Because chemists can swap out the metal nodes and the organic linkers almost at will, the design space is enormous: researchers have already synthesized more than 100,000 distinct MOFs, and the properties of hundreds of thousands more have been predicted computationally.

That structural versatility is precisely why MOFs have long been considered promising candidates for carbon capture. Kyriakos Stylianou, professor of chemistry in the Oregon State University College of Science and director of the university’s Materials Discovery Laboratory, known as the MaD Lab, has emphasized that capturing carbon dioxide is critical for meeting net-zero emission targets and that MOFs have shown considerable promise thanks to their porosity and adaptability. Yet the same porous interiors that make MOFs effective adsorbents also make them vulnerable. In many promising materials, water molecules compete with carbon dioxide for the same adsorption sites, and in humid conditions the water wins, effectively shutting down the capture process.

BVR-X sidesteps this failure mode through an unusual internal organization. Rather than allowing water and carbon dioxide to compete for the same space, the material directs the two molecules to different regions inside its pores, a strategy the researchers describe as pore compartmentalization. Water is shepherded away from the sites where carbon dioxide is captured, so moisture no longer blocks the adsorption chemistry. As Stylianou explained, this internal organization helps the material work under conditions that more closely resemble real industrial emissions, where humidity is not an inconvenience to be engineered away but a constant feature of the gas stream.

The implications of that design choice are economic as much as scientific. Flue gases can, in principle, be dried before they reach a capture bed, but dehumidifying enormous volumes of exhaust adds significant expense, enough to render the carbon dioxide removal process nonviable for many industrial applications. A material that tolerates or even exploits humidity removes that cost barrier entirely. Stylianou noted that water usually makes capturing carbon dioxide more difficult, but that the new material responds to water by changing in a way that lets it keep capturing the greenhouse gas effectively even under very humid conditions, an adaptive behavior that sets it apart from conventional adsorbents.

Laboratory testing put that claim to the test under deliberately challenging conditions. The MOF efficiently captured carbon dioxide from a highly humid stream containing just 4 percent carbon dioxide, a composition relevant to emissions from natural gas combustion. Separating a small amount of carbon dioxide in the presence of substantial water is particularly challenging, Stylianou observed, which makes the result especially relevant for gas-fired power plants and similar facilities. A dilute, wet gas stream is close to a worst-case scenario for many adsorbents, and demonstrating strong performance there suggests the material is built for the messiness of real smokestacks rather than the tidy conditions of a laboratory bench.

Durability and reusability, the qualities that determine whether a laboratory curiosity can become an industrial workhorse, also feature prominently in the findings. According to the researchers, the material can be regenerated and reused, maintaining its performance through dozens of capture-and-release cycles while tolerating demanding conditions. Regeneration, the step in which captured carbon dioxide is released so the adsorbent can be used again, is central to the economics of any capture technology, since a sorbent that degrades after a handful of cycles would need constant replacement. Sustained performance across repeated cycles, combined with tolerance for the heat and chemical variability of flue gas, are important qualities for practical carbon capture technologies.

The study was a collaborative effort. Working alongside Stylianou were MaD Lab members Ankit Yadav, Emmanuel Musa and Andrzej Gładysiak, along with Micah Hickethier, Chun-Wai Chang and Kai Shen Choong of the Oregon State College of Engineering. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Oregon and the ARAMCO Research and Development Center also contributed. Funding came from Saudi Aramco, the Murdock Charitable Trust, and the donor-advised fund of Oregon State alumni and retired public school teachers Brian and Marilyn Kleiner through the OSU Foundation. Saudi Aramco applied for a patent on the synthesis and carbon dioxide capture properties of BVR-X, with several of the researchers listed as co-inventors.

The advance arrives at a moment when the world’s carbon removal infrastructure remains soberingly small. Facilities that filter carbon directly from ambient air are beginning to appear around the globe, including the world’s largest such plant, which opened in Iceland in 2024, but as Stylianou notes they are not yet capable of making a large dent in worldwide emissions; in a year, that Icelandic plant can draw out carbon dioxide in quantities comparable to the annual emissions of roughly 7,200 cars. Point-source capture at factories and power plants, where carbon dioxide is far more concentrated, offers a nearer-term path, and materials like BVR-X, which thrive in the humid, dilute conditions of real exhaust streams, could help close the gap between laboratory promise and industrial deployment in the race toward net-zero emissions.

Subject of Research: A water-tolerant metal-organic framework for industrial carbon capture

Article Title: New material developed at Oregon State provides boost to carbon capture technologies

Article References: New material developed at Oregon State provides boost to carbon capture technologies. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: carbon capture, metal-organic frameworks, MOFs, flue gas, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas emissions, Oregon State University, adsorption, climate change mitigation, porous materials, net-zero emissions, industrial emissions