Many of the mixture models of water seek to explain the large free energy change associated with hydrophobic hydration by means of changes in the number and character of the hydrogen bonds in water. All of these models, regardless of detail, are in clash with the idea that hydrogen bond rearrangements will produce changes in both enthalpy and entropy, which largely compensate to produce little net free energy change. One of the simplest and most recent of these mixture models is Muller's two-state model, which produces small enthalpy and large negative entropy changes. In this paper, Muller's model is examined in detail. It is found that only slight changes are required in order for the model to produce nearly compensating enthalpy and entropy changes.

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Although the hydrophobic effect is generally considered to be one of the most important forces in stabilizing the folded structure of a globular protein molecule, there is a lack of consensus on the precise magnitude of this effect. The magnitude of the hydrophobic effect is most directly measured by observing the change in stability of a protein molecule when a n internal hydrophobic residue is mutated to another of smaller size. Results of such measurements have, however, been confusing because they vary greatly and are generally considerably larger than expected from the transfer free energies of corresponding small molecules. In this article, a thermodynamic argument is presented to show (1) that the variation is mainly due to that in the flexibility of the protein molecule at the site of mutation, (2) that the maximum destabilization occurs when the protein at the site of mutation is rigid, in which case the value of the destabilization is approximately given by the work of cavity formation in water, and (3) that the transfer free energy approximately gives the minimum of the range of variations. The best numerical agreements between the small molecule and the protein systems are obtained when the data from the small molecule system are expressed as the molarity-based standard free energies without other corrections.

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The Fv fragments are the smallest units of antibodies that retain the specific antigen binding characteristics of the whole molecule and are being used for the diagnosis and therapy of human diseases. These are noncovalently associated heterodimers of the heavy (VH) and the light (VL) chain variable domains, which, without modification, tend to dissociate, unfold, and/or nonspecifically aggregate. The fragment is usually stabilized by producing it as a single chain recombinant molecule in which the two chains are linked by means of a short polypeptide linker. An alternative strategy is to connect the two chains by means of an interchain disulfide bond. We used molecular graphics and other modeling tools to identify two possible interchain disulfide bond sites in the framework region of the Fv fragment of the monoclonal mouse antibody (mAb) B3. The mAb B3 binds to many human cancer cells and is being used in the development of a new anticancer agent. The two sites identified are VH44-VL105 and VH111-VL48. (VH44-VL100 and VH105-VL43 in the numbering scheme of Kabat et al., "Sequence of Proteins of Immunological Interest," U.S. DHHS, NIH publication No. 91-3242, 1991). This design was recently tested using the chimeric protein composed of a truncated form of Pseudomonas exotoxin and the Fv fragment of mAb B3 with the engineered disulfide bond at VH44-VL105 (Brinkmann et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 90:7538, 1993). The chimeric toxin was found to be just as active as the corresponding single chain counterpart and considerably more stable. Because these disulfide bond sites are in the framework region, they can be located from sequence alignment alone. We expect that the disulfide bond at these sites will stabilize the Fv fragment of most antibodies and the antigen-specific portion of the T-cell receptors, which are homologous.

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