Key Laboratory of Orogenic Belts and Crustal Evolution, Ministry of Education, The School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Molecules. 2022 Oct 18;27(20):7009. doi: 10.3390/molecules27207009.
Hydrophobic interactions are involved in and believed to be the fundamental driving force of many chemical and biological phenomena in aqueous environments. This review focuses on our current understanding on hydrophobic effects. As a solute is embedded into water, the interface appears between solute and water, which mainly affects the structure of interfacial water (the topmost water layer at the solute/water interface). From our recent structural studies on water and air-water interface, hydration free energy is derived and utilized to investigate the origin of hydrophobic interactions. It is found that hydration free energy depends on the size of solute. With increasing the solute size, it is reasonably divided into initial and hydrophobic solvation processes, and various dissolved behaviors of the solutes are expected in different solvation processes, such as dispersed and accumulated distributions in solutions. Regarding the origin of hydrophobic effects, it is ascribed to the structural competition between the hydrogen bondings of interfacial and bulk water. This can be applied to understand the characteristics of hydrophobic interactions, such as the dependence of hydrophobic interactions on solute size (or concentrations), the directional natures of hydrophobic interactions, and temperature effects on hydrophobic interactions.
疏水相互作用涉及并被认为是水相环境中许多化学和生物现象的基本驱动力。本综述重点介绍了我们目前对疏水效应的理解。当溶质嵌入水中时，溶质和水之间会出现界面，这主要影响界面水的结构（在溶质/水界面的最顶层水层）。从我们最近对水和气-水界面的结构研究中，推导出水合自由能并用于研究疏水相互作用的起源。结果发现，水合自由能取决于溶质的大小。随着溶质尺寸的增加，可以合理地将其分为初始和疏水溶剂化过程，并且预计在不同的溶剂化过程中各种溶质会有不同的溶解行为，例如在溶液中分散和聚集分布。关于疏水效应的起源，它归因于界面和体相水中氢键之间的结构竞争。这可以用来理解疏水相互作用的特征，例如疏水相互作用对溶质尺寸（或浓度）的依赖性、疏水相互作用的方向性以及温度对疏水相互作用的影响。
