The solubility of hydrophobic molecules in water is sensitive to salt addition in an ion‐specific manner. Such “salting‐out” and “salting‐in” properties have been shown to be a major contributor to the measured ion‐specific Hofmeister effects that are observed in many biophysical phenomena. Various theoretical models have suggested a number of disparate mechanisms for salting‐out (salting‐in) of hydrophobic moieties, the most popular of which include preferential interaction, water‐mediated association, and electrostriction models. However, a complete molecular level description of this ion‐specificity is not yet available. This work investigates the ion‐specific nature of hydrophobic solvation by studying how sodium and chloride salts affect the thermodynamics of 1,2‐hexanediol micellization. The results of this study are analyzed in terms of scaled‐particle theory and we show that salt addition can affect hydrophobic solvation in two modalities: salt addition changes the cavitation free energy; salt addition also influences the solvent‐solute interaction energy by changing the hydration of the hydrophobic solute. These two effects are salt specific in nature and we suggest that for small hydrophobic solutes these effects are the main cause of salt‐specific Hofmeister effects on their solubility.
Elemental sulfur exists primarily as an S80 ring and serves as terminal electron acceptor for a variety of sulfur-fermenting bacteria. Hyperthermophilic archaea from black smoker vents are an exciting research tool to advance our knowledge of sulfur respiration under extreme conditions. Here, we use a hybrid method approach to demonstrate that the proteinaceous cavities of the S-layer nanotube of the hyperthermophilic archaeon Staphylothermus marinus act as a storage reservoir for cyclo-octasulfur S8. Fully atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed and the method of multiconfigurational thermodynamic integration was employed to compute the absolute free energy for transferring a ring of elemental sulfur S8 from an aqueous bath into the largest hydrophobic cavity of a fragment of archaeal tetrabrachion. Comparisons with earlier MD studies of the free energy of hydration as a function of water occupancy in the same cavity of archaeal tetrabrachion show that the sulfur ring is energetically favored over water.
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