BOZEMAN – The art of chemistry doesn’t always involve stirring a bubbling reaction in an elaborate glass apparatus. A new world of chemistry lies below the surface of a new class of materials called metal-organic frameworks, the discovery of which was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2025.

These solid crystals, often vibrant in color and rigid by comparison to liquids and gases, consist of a molecular-sized scaffold, open for exploration by gases from all sides. Such materials have the potential to both advance fundamental understanding of chemical bonding and bring about exciting technological innovations.

This week, the journal Science published a paper describing an unusual chemical reaction on a metal-organic framework, or MOF, that was investigated with the help of a pair of Montana State University chemists. Nick Stadie, associate professor in MSU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Letters and Science and his undergraduate student Peyton Summerhill are co-authors on the paper that characterizes a novel porous crystal designed and developed by scientists in the Long Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley.

The paper reports that each cobalt atom on the MOF’s open, repeating structure can bind a pair of carbon monoxide molecules, resulting in a higher energetic payoff than if single carbon monoxide molecules were to bind independently. So-called cooperative interactions are well known in biological processes, such as when hemoglobin in red blood cells binds with and delivers oxygen throughout the body, but they are rarely observed on solid surfaces.

Stadie said the paper demonstrates a concept that inspires new avenues for the development of sensors, molecular sieves and advanced energy delivery materials for the world’s most challenging chemical detections and separations.

“The huge curiosity is that you can bind two gas molecules on a single metal atom on every such metal atom in the entire crystal,” he said. “That’s an extremely efficient use of structure.”

Stadie and Summerhill, now a third-year MSU undergraduate student majoring in chemistry, began working with the Berkeley researchers after searching for experimental data that Summerhill could use to validate her newly developed theoretical models of gas binding on patterned solid surfaces.

Stadie’s contacts at Berkeley pointed him to Kurtis Carsch, now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Carsch’s latest crystal demonstrated an extremely rare gas binding mechanism that was a perfect testing ground for Summerhill’s models.

“It gets right to the heart of the question of what cooperation even is at a chemical level, and we knew right away that we could deliver them some potential new insights,” Stadie said.

For six months in 2024, Stadie supervised Summerhill as she applied a series of different models to understand the process that the Berkeley researchers believed was responsible for the cooperative reaction between the cobalt sites and carbon monoxide. With a pencil, paper and computer, she set out to quantify the energetic payoff of the cooperation, which the Berkeley researchers hadn’t pinpointed.

“In this case, there’s a 10% penalty when two carbon monoxide molecules go on individually versus when they go on as a team,” Stadie said. “Measuring this was our new contribution.”

Summerhill first started working with Stadie in 2021 after she attended the Honors College’s Freshman Research Symposium, where Stadie gave a talk. At the time, she was a junior at Bozeman High School.

“I learned that solid-state chemistry was a thing, and that it was crazy and cool and involved beautiful structures,” Summerhill said. “I personally liked it, because it wasn’t very goopy and it wasn’t very alive.”

She approached Stadie about doing a research project, and he agreed to work with her on a theory-oriented project involving adsorption thermodynamics, the study of energy changes that occur when a substance adheres to a surface. Summerhill later enrolled at MSU, where she continued her theoretical research and also began performing gas adsorption experiments in the Stadie laboratory. Last summer, she worked full time in the lab alongside the chemistry department’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates cohort, and she continues to work on improving her models as she studies for her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and minor in modern languages and literatures.

Despite already having achieved the distinction of co-authoring a paper for a prestigious journal, Summerhill said she’s learned that scientific progress always comes with great effort and that it sometimes results from mistakes.

“You can be failing forward instead of backward,” she said. “It’s really fun to do undergraduate research because the projects have so much potential and you can afford to just throw yourself into it and fail or succeed. I’ve fallen in love with the research.”

Summerhill said she plans to go on to graduate school and pursue a research career.