If you confine the enzyme FDH in a metal-organic framework (MOF) with magnetite, it is stable enough to be recycled after it has reduced CO₂, as Argentinean researchers show in the journal Chemistry – A European Journal.

While humans are making great efforts to convert inert CO₂ into something useful, nature has interesting nanomachines in the form of enzymes. The enzyme formate dehydrogenase (FDH) normally converts methanoate (formate) into CO₂, but under certain conditions it does the opposite.

Matías Aguirre, Cristina Ramírez and Yesica Di Iorio from the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata wanted to take advantage of this. This had been tried before, for example by using the free enzyme or by binding it to a support, but the results were not satisfactory, so they took a different approach: they bound it to a metal-organic framework (MOF).