Temperature and Length Scale Dependence of Solvophobic Solvation in a Single-site Water-like Liquid

TL;DR

This study investigates how temperature and length scale influence solvophobic solvation in a water-like Jagla liquid, revealing key thermodynamic similarities to water and implications for protein stability.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the Jagla liquid captures water-like solvation behavior, highlighting the role of a second energy scale in modeling hydrophobic effects and aggregation phenomena.

Findings

Jagla liquid reproduces water-like temperature-dependent solvation thermodynamics.

Presence of a second energy scale favors low-density structures and hydrophobic hydration.

Aggregation stability depends on solute size and temperature, explaining cold denaturation.

Abstract

The temperature and length scale dependence of solvation properties of spherical hard solvophobic solutes is investigated in the Jagla liquid, a simple liquid that consists of particles interacting via a spherically symmetric potential combining a hard core repulsion and a longer ranged soft core interaction, yet exhibits water-like anomalies. The results are compared with equivalent calculations for a model of a typical atomic liquid, the Lennard-Jones (LJ) potential, and with predictions for hydrophobic solvation in water using the cavity equation of state and the extended simple point charge (SPC/E) model. We find that the Jagla liquid captures the qualitative thermodynamic behavior of hydrophobic hydration as a function of temperature for both small and large length scale solutes. In particular, for both the Jagla liquid and water, we observe temperature-dependent enthalpy and entropy of solvation for all solute sizes as well as a negative solvation entropy for sufficiently small solutes at low temperature. The results suggest that, compared to a simple liquid, it is the presence of a second thermally accessible repulsive energy scale, acting to increasingly favor larger separations for decreasing temperature, that is the essential characteristic of a liquid that favors low-density, open structures and models hydrophobic hydration, and that it is the presence of this second energy scale that leads to the similarity in the behavior of water and the Jagla liquid. The implications of the temperature and length scale dependence of solvation free energies in water-like liquids are explored with a simple model for the aggregation of solvophobic solutes. We show how aggregate stability depends upon the size of the aggregate and the size of its constituent solutes, and we relate this dependence to cold-induced destabilization phenomena such as the cold-induced denaturation of proteins.