No Arabic abstract
An understanding of density fluctuations in bulk water has made significant contributions to our understanding of the hydration and interactions of idealized, purely repulsive hydrophobic solutes. To similarly inform the hydration of realistic hydrophobic solutes that have dispersive interactions with water, here we characterize water density fluctuations in the presence of attractive fields that correspond to solute-water attractions. We find that when the attractive field acts only in the solute hydration shell, but not in the solute core, it does not significantly alter water density fluctuations in the solute core region. We further find that for a wide range of solute sizes and attraction strengths, the free energetics of turning on the attractive fields in bulk water are accurately captured by linear response theory. Our results also suggest strategies for more efficiently estimating hydration free energies of realistic solutes in bulk water and at interfaces.
Nuclear quantum effects, such as zero-point energy and tunneling, cause significant changes to the structure and dynamics of hydrogen bonded systems such as liquid water. However, due to the current inability to simulate liquid water using an exact description of its electronic structure, the interplay between nuclear and electronic quantum effects remains unclear. Here we use simulations that incorporate the quantum mechanical nature of both the nuclei and electrons to provide a fully ab initio determination of the particle quantum kinetic energies, free energy change upon exchanging hydrogen for deuterium and the isotope fractionation ratio in water. These properties, which selectively probe the quantum nature of the nuclear degrees of freedom, allow us to make direct comparison to recent experiments and elucidate how electronic exchange and correlation and nuclear quantum fluctuations determine the structure of the hydrogen bond in water.
We use appropriately defined short ranged reference models of liquid water to clarify the different roles local hydrogen bonding, van der Waals attractions, and long ranged electrostatic interactions play in the solvation and association of apolar solutes in water. While local hydrogen bonding in- teractions dominate hydrophobic effects involving small solutes, longer ranged electrostatic and dis- persion interactions are found to be increasingly important in the description of interfacial structure around large solutes. The hydrogen bond network sets the solute length scale at which a crossover in solvation behavior between these small and large length scale regimes is observed. Unbalanced long ranged forces acting on interfacial water molecules are also important in hydrophobic association, illustrated here by analysis of the association of model methane and buckminsterfullerene solutes.
The aversion of hydrophobic solutes for water drives diverse interactions and assemblies across materials science, biology and beyond. % Here, we review the theoretical, computational and experimental developments which underpin a contemporary understanding of hydrophobic effects. % We discuss how an understanding of density fluctuations in bulk water can shed light on the fundamental differences in the hydration of molecular and macroscopic solutes; these differences, in turn, explain why hydrophobic interactions become stronger upon increasing temperature. We also illustrate the sensitive dependence of surface hydrophobicity on the chemical and topographical patterns the surface displays, which makes the use approximate approaches for estimating hydrophobicity particularly challenging. Importantly, the hydrophobicity of complex surfaces, such as those of proteins, which display nanoscale heterogeneity, can nevertheless be characterized using interfacial water density fluctuations; such a characterization also informs protein regions that mediate their interactions. Finally, we build upon an understanding of hydrophobic hydration and the ability to characterize hydrophobicity to inform the context-dependent thermodynamic forces that drive hydrophobic interactions and the desolvation barriers that impede them.
The interactions of a protein, its phase behavior, and ultimately, its ability to function, are all influenced by the interactions between the protein and its hydration waters. Here we study proteins with a variety of sizes, shapes, chemistries, and biological functions, and characterize their interactions with their hydration waters using molecular simulation and enhanced sampling techniques. We find that akin to extended hydrophobic surfaces, proteins situate their hydration waters at the edge of a dewetting transition, making them susceptible to unfavorable perturbations. We also find that the strength of the unfavorable potential needed to trigger dewetting is roughly the same, regardless of the protein being studied, and depends only the width of the hydration shell being perturbed. Our findings establish a framework for systematically classifying protein patches according to how favorably they interact with water.
Adding salt to water at ambient pressure affects its thermodynamic properties. At low salt concentration, anomalies such as the density maximum are shifted to lower temperature, while at large enough salt concentration they cannot be observed any more. Here we investigate the effect of salt on an anomaly recently observed in pure water at negative pressure: the existence of a sound velocity minimum along isochores. We compare experiments and simulations for an aqueous solution of sodium chloride with molality around $1.2,mathrm{mol,kg^{-1}}$, reaching pressures beyond $-100,mathrm{MPa}$. We also discuss the origin of the minima in the sound velocity and emphasize the importance of the relative position of the temperatures of sound velocity and density anomalies.