We investigated the solvation of carboxylate ions from formate to hexanoate, in droplets of 50 to 1000 water molecules and neat water, by computations using standard molecular dynamics and sophisticated polarizable models. The carboxylate ions from methanoate to hexanoate show strong propensity for the air/water interface in small droplets. Only the ions larger than propanoate retain propensity for the interface in larger droplets, where their enthalpic stabilization by ion/water dispersion is reduced there by 3 kcal mol(-1) per CH2 group. This is compensated by entropy effects over +3.3 cal mol(-1) K(-1) per CH2 group. On the surface, the anionic headgroups are strongly oriented toward the aqueous core, while the hydrophobic alkyl chains are repelled into air and lose their structure-making effects. These results reproduce the structure-making effects of alkyl groups in solution, and suggest that the hydrocarbon chains of ionic headgroups and alkyl substituents solvate independently. Extrapolation to bulk solution using standard extrapolation schemes yields absolute carboxylate solvation energies. The results for formate and acetate yield a proton solvation enthalpy of about 270 kcal mol(-1), close to the experiment-based value. The largest carboxylate ions yield a value smaller by about 10 kcal mol(-1), which requires studies in much larger droplets.

We applied an alternative, purely theoretical route to estimate thermodynamical properties of organic ions in bulk solution. The method performs a large ensemble of simulations of ions solvated in water nanodroplets of different sizes, using a polarizable molecular dynamics approach. We consider protonated ammonia and methylamines, and K(+) for comparison, solvated in droplets of 50-1000 water molecules. The parameters of the model are assigned from high level quantum computations of small clusters. All the bulk phase results extrapolated from droplet simulations match, and confirm independently, the relative and absolute experiment-based ion solvation energies. Without using experiment-based parameters or assumptions, the results confirm independently the solvation enthalpy of the proton, as -270.3 ± 1.1 kcal mol(-1). The calculated relative solvation enthalpies of these ions are constant from small water clusters, where only the ionic headgroups are solvated, up to bulk solution. This agrees with experimental thermochemistry, that the relative solvation energies of alkylammonium ions by only four H2O molecules reproduce the relative bulk solvation energies, although the small clusters lack major bulk solvation factors. The droplet results also show a slow convergence of ion solvation properties toward their bulk limit, and predict that the stepwise solvation enthalpies of ion/water droplets are very close to those of pure neutral water droplets already after 50 water molecules. Both the ionic and neutral clusters approach the bulk condensation energy very gradually up to 10,000 water molecules, consistent with the macroscopic liquid drop model for pure water droplets. Compared to standard computational methods based on infinite periodic systems, our protocol represents a new purely theoretical approach to investigate the solvation properties of ions. It is applicable to the solvation of organic ions, which are pivotal in environmental, industrial, and biophysical chemistry but have been little investigated theoretically up to the present.

We present a combined theoretical approach based on analyzing molecular dynamics trajectories (at the nanosecond scale) generated by use of classical polarizable force fields and on quantum calculations to compute averaged hyperfine coupling constants. That method is used to estimate the constant of a prototypical nitroxide: the dimethylnitroxide. The molecule is embedded during the simulations in a cubic box containing about 500 water molecules and the molecular dynamics is generated using periodic conditions. Once the trajectories are achieved, the nitroxide and its first hydration shell molecules are extracted, and the coupling constants are computed by considering the latter aggregates by means of quantum computations. However, all the water molecules of the bulk are also accounted for during those computations by means of the electrostatic potential fitted method. Our results exhibit that in order to predict accurate and reliable coupling constants, one needs to describe carefully the out-of-plane motion of the nitroxide nitrogen and to sample trajectories with a time interval of 400 fs at least to generate an uncorrelated large set of nitroxide structures. Compared to Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics techniques, our approach can be used readily to compute hyperfine coupling constants of large systems, such as nitroxides of great size interacting with macromolecules such as proteins or polymers.

We investigated the main two factors influencing the mean hyperfine coupling constants of small nitroxide radicals in aqueous solution, i.e., the out-of-plane displacement of their nitrogen atom and the environmental effects (solvent effects), by means of the approach we previously developed and fine-tuned to study the solvation of the dimethyl nitroxide radical. Our methodology efficiently combines classical molecular dynamics based on a polarizable force field at the nanosecond scale and quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) computations to account for the bulk instantaneous electrostatic environmental effect. Our method has been applied to five small nitroxides, namely methyl nitroxide, ethyl nitroxide, dimethyl nitroxide, di-tert-butyl nitroxide, and PROXYL. The theoretical nitrogen hyperfine coupling constant values for the five nitroxides in solution are in good agreement with experiment (difference of 0.3 G on average). Our approach showed that the solvent shift in nitroxide hyperfine coupling constants is almost constant whatever the nitroxide, and, particularly, whatever the nitroxide NO moiety's accessibility to the solvent. This result contrasts with earlier results derived from 10 ps scale trajectories based on Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics approach. However, we show that if we consider on average these latter results, they are in agreement with our conclusion. We also present an attempt to identify the origin of this result by analyzing the solvent contributions in terms of effects of the nitroxide first hydration shell and of the bulk, and by investigating the relation between these two contributions and the solvent structure at the vicinity of the NO moiety.