Nature 524, 74–48 (2015)

The capability of porous materials such as metal–organic frameworks and zeolites for high capacity and selective molecular adsorption makes them very attractive materials for the separation and storage of gases such as CO2. Although the porosity of metal–organic frameworks can be easily tailored to control their adsorptive characteristics, this is more difficult for inorganic zeolites. The characterization of new zeolites to confirm their structures is also less straightforward. A team led by Suk Bong Hong, Paul Wright and Xiaodong Zou now present a strategy by which zeolite structures can be predictably designed. By using electron diffraction to solve the structure of the zeolite ZSM-25, they identified a number of structural features similar to those of the smaller zeolite, paulingite. Using these as a 'structural coding' they then succeeded in designing and synthesizing sequentially expanded structures with increased complexity and unit-cell volume compared with ZSM-25 but bearing the same structural features, and importantly, the same capability for selective CO2 adsorption.