An international team of researchers, led by the Universities of Padua and Hong Kong, has discovered an innovative material with properties similar to those of biological protein capsules. This breakthrough could revolutionize air and water purification. The study, titled "Dynamic Supramolecular Snub Cubes", was published in the journal Nature and coordinated by Sir James Fraser Stoddart, Nobel laureate in Chemistry in 2016, who passed away on December 30, 2024.

The research, which brought together the Universities of Padua and Hong Kong, also involved leading institutions in the United States—Duke University, Northwestern University, the University of South Florida, and the California Institute of Technology—and China, including Tianjin, Anhui, and Zhejiang Universities.

Natural biological capsules, which store and transport essential substances, have now been successfully replicated in the laboratory as artificial supramolecular polyhedra. These innovative materials are capable of capturing and releasing pollutants in a controlled manner, using light as a stimulus. This advancement opens the door to numerous applications, particularly in air and water purification through the storage of hydrocarbons.

Luka Ðorđević, one of the study's authors and a professor at the Department of Chemical Sciences at the University of Padua, emphasized the crucial role of molecular chirality—a property that enables mirror-image objects to recognize and self-assemble—in creating these synthetic capsules. "In our study, we observed how chiral molecules can recognize and self-assemble into synthetic capsules just a few nanometres in size. The size of the capsule determines what it can store. While creating polyhedra from macroscopic objects is relatively simple, producing them at nanoscopic scales is highly challenging."

The study demonstrates that capsules only a few nanometres in size are sufficient to store hydrocarbons such as benzene and cyclohexane, two major air and water pollutants.

The geometry of the material, known as a snub cube, plays a critical role in determining its properties and potential applications, making it a promising tool in the fight against pollution.