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A local fingerprint for hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity: From methane to peptides.

  • Pérez-Conesa S Department of Physical Chemistry, University of Seville, 41012 Seville, Spain.
  • Piaggi PM Theory and Simulation of Materials (THEOS), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Parrinello M Facoltà di Informatica, Istituto di Scienze Computazionali, and National Center for Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials (MARVEL), Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Via Giuseppe Buffi 13, CH-6900 Lugano, Switzerland.
  • 2019-06-03
Published in:
  • The Journal of chemical physics. - 2019
Hydrogen Bonding
Hydrophobic and Hydrophilic Interactions
Methane
Models, Molecular
Peptides
Protein Conformation
Thermodynamics
English An important characteristic that determines the behavior of a solute in water is whether it is hydrophobic or hydrophilic. The traditional classification is based on chemical experience and heuristics. However, this does not reveal how the local environment modulates this important property. We present a local fingerprint for hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity inspired by the two body contribution to the entropy. This fingerprint is an inexpensive, quantitative, and physically meaningful way of studying hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity that only requires as input the water-solute radial distribution functions. We apply our fingerprint to octanol, benzene, and 20 proteinogenic amino acids. Our measure of hydrophilicity is coherent with chemical experience, and moreover, it also shows how the character of an atom can change as its environment is changed. Finally, we use the fingerprint as a collective variable in a funnel metadynamics simulation of a host-guest system. The fingerprint serves as a desolvation collective variable that enhances transitions between the bound and unbound states.
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  • English
Open access status
green
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https://sonar.ch/global/documents/94884
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