Temperature effects on the hydrophobic interaction of parallel plates in the framework of the probabilistic approach to hydrogen bonding

Mechanism of the Decrease in Surface Tension by Bulk Nanobubbles (Ultrafine Bubbles)

The mechanism of the decrease in the surface tension of water containing bulk nanobubbles (ultrafine bubbles) is studied theoretically by numerical simulations of the adsorption of bulk nanobubbles at the liquid's surface based on the dynamic equilibrium model for the stability of a bulk nanobubble under the conditions of the Tuziuti experiment (Tuziuti, T., et al., Langmuir, 2023, 39, 5771-5778). It is predicted that the concentration of bulk nanobubbles in the bulk liquid decreases considerably with time, as many bulk nanobubbles are gradually adsorbed at the liquid's surface. A part of the decrease in surface tension is due to the Janus-like structure of a bulk nanobubble that could partly break the hydrogen bond network of water molecules at the liquid's surface because more than 50% of the bubble's surface is covered with hydrophobic impurities, according to the dynamic equilibrium model. The theoretically estimated decrease in surface tension due to the Janus-like structure of a bulk nanobubble agrees with the experimental data of the decrease in surface tension solely by bulk nanobubbles obtained by the comparison of before and after the elimination of bulk nanobubbles by the freeze-thaw process. This effect cannot be explained by the electric charge stabilization model widely discussed for the stability of a bulk nanobubble, although the present model is only applicable to the solution containing hydrophobic impurities. Another part of the decrease in surface tension should be due to impurities produced from a nanobubble generator, such as a mechanical seal, which was partly confirmed by the TOC measurements.

A probabilistic approach to the effect of water hydrogen bonds on the kinetics of protein folding and protein denaturation

Previously, we presented a review of our kinetic models for the nucleation mechanism of protein folding and for the protein thermal denaturation in a barrierless way. A protein was treated as a random heteropolymer consisting of hydrophobic, hydrophilic, and neutral beads. As a crucial idea of the model, an overall potential around the cluster of native residues wherein a residue performs a chaotic motion was considered as the combination of the average dihedral, effective pairwise, and confining potentials. The overall potential as a function of the distance from the cluster has a double well shape. This allowed one to develop kinetic models for the nucleation mechanism of protein folding (NMPF) and barrierless protein denaturation (BPD) by using the mean first passage time analysis. In the original models, however, hydrogen bonding effects were taken into account only indirectly which affected the accuracy of the models because hydrogen bonding does play a crucial role in the folding, stability, and denaturation of proteins. To improve the NMPF and BPD models and explicitly take into account the hydrogen bonding "water-water" and "water-protein residue", we have developed a probabilistic hydrogen bond (PHB) model for the effect of hydrogen bond networks of water molecules around two solute particles (immersed in water) on their interaction, and have then combined the PHB model with the NMPF and BPD models. In this paper, that can be regarded as sequel of our previous review, we analyze the modified NMPF and BPD models that explicitly take into account the effect of water-water hydrogen bonding on these processes. As expected, the application of the modified models to the folding/unfolding of two model proteins (one short, consisting of 124 residues and the other large, consisting of 2500 residues) demonstrate that the hydrogen bond networks play a very important role in the protein folding/unfolding phenomena.