The Hydrophobic Effects: Our Current Understanding

Hydrophobic interactions are involved in and believed to be the fundamental driving force of many chemical and biological phenomena in aqueous environments. This review focuses on our current understanding on hydrophobic effects. As a solute is embedded into water, the interface appears between solute and water, which mainly affects the structure of interfacial water (the topmost water layer at the solute/water interface). From our recent structural studies on water and air-water interface, hydration free energy is derived and utilized to investigate the origin of hydrophobic interactions. It is found that hydration free energy depends on the size of solute. With increasing the solute size, it is reasonably divided into initial and hydrophobic solvation processes, and various dissolved behaviors of the solutes are expected in different solvation processes, such as dispersed and accumulated distributions in solutions. Regarding the origin of hydrophobic effects, it is ascribed to the structural competition between the hydrogen bondings of interfacial and bulk water. This can be applied to understand the characteristics of hydrophobic interactions, such as the dependence of hydrophobic interactions on solute size (or concentrations), the directional natures of hydrophobic interactions, and temperature effects on hydrophobic interactions.