skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Reference interaction site model with hydrophobicity induced density inhomogeneity: An analytical theory to compute solvation properties of large hydrophobic solutes in the mixture of polyatomic solvent molecules

Journal Article · · Journal of Chemical Physics
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4928051· OSTI ID:22493486
 [1];  [2];  [1]
  1. The HKUST Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen (China)
  2. Department of Chemistry, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon (Hong Kong)

Reference interaction site model (RISM) has recently become a popular approach in the study of thermodynamical and structural properties of the solvent around macromolecules. On the other hand, it was widely suggested that there exists water density depletion around large hydrophobic solutes (>1 nm), and this may pose a great challenge to the RISM theory. In this paper, we develop a new analytical theory, the Reference Interaction Site Model with Hydrophobicity induced density Inhomogeneity (RISM-HI), to compute solvent radial distribution function (RDF) around large hydrophobic solute in water as well as its mixture with other polyatomic organic solvents. To achieve this, we have explicitly considered the density inhomogeneity at the solute-solvent interface using the framework of the Yvon-Born-Green hierarchy, and the RISM theory is used to obtain the solute-solvent pair correlation. In order to efficiently solve the relevant equations while maintaining reasonable accuracy, we have also developed a new closure called the D2 closure. With this new theory, the solvent RDFs around a large hydrophobic particle in water and different water-acetonitrile mixtures could be computed, which agree well with the results of the molecular dynamics simulations. Furthermore, we show that our RISM-HI theory can also efficiently compute the solvation free energy of solute with a wide range of hydrophobicity in various water-acetonitrile solvent mixtures with a reasonable accuracy. We anticipate that our theory could be widely applied to compute the thermodynamic and structural properties for the solvation of hydrophobic solute.

OSTI ID:
22493486
Journal Information:
Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol. 143, Issue 5; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-9606
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English