Protein solubility and conformational stability are a result of a balance of interactions both within a protein and between protein and solvent. The electrostatic solvation free energy of oligoglycines, models for the peptide backbone, becomes more favorable with an increasing length, yet longer peptides collapse due to the formation of favorable intrapeptide interactions between CO dipoles, in some cases without hydrogen bonds. The strongly repulsive solvent cavity formation is balanced by van der Waals attractions and electrostatic contributions. In order to investigate the competition between solvent exclusion and charge interactions we simulate the collapse of a long oligoglycine comprised of 15 residues while scaling the charges on the peptide from zero to fully charged. We examine the effect this has on the conformational properties of the peptide. We also describe the approximate thermodynamic changes that occur during the scaling both in terms of intrapeptide potentials and peptide-water potentials, and estimate the electrostatic solvation free energy of the system.

The angular dependent site-renormalized integral equation theory is developed to compute the dihedral conformation distribution and intermolecular pair distributions of n-butane at infinite dilution in a Lennard-Jones solvent. The equations take advantage of the topological diagrammatic expansion of the full angular dependent molecular system by resumming the series in conjunction with the intramolecular degree of freedom. To first order in an angular basis set, the numerical results of these site-renormalized equations are a systematic quantitative improvement over previous methods. In particular, the thermodynamics and conformational distribution of the solute are essentially indistinguishable from simulation.

Monte Carlo computer simulations in the canonical and grand canonical statistical ensemble were used to explore the properties of the central force (CF1) water model. The intramolecular structure of the HO molecule is well reproduced by the model. Emphasis was made on hydrogen bonding, and on the tehrahedral, , and translational, , order parameters. An energetic definition of the hydrogen bond gives more consistent results for the average number of hydrogen bonds compared to the one-parameter distance criterion. At 300 K, an average value of 3.8 was obtained. The and metrics were used to elucidate the water-like anomalous behaviour of the CF1 model. The structural anomalies lead to the density anomaly, with a good agreement of the model's density with the experimental () trends. The chemical potential-density projection of the model's equation of state was explored. Vapour-liquid coexistence was observed at sufficiently low temperatures.