An aqueous solution of urea is a very important mixture of biological relevance because of the definitive role of urea as protein denaturant at high concentrations. There has been an extended debate over the years on urea's influence on the structure of water. On the basis of a variety of analysis methods employed, urea has been described as a structure-breaker, a structure-maker, or as neutral toward water structure. Using molecular dynamics simulation and a nearest neighbor approach of analyzing water structure, we present here a detailed analysis of the effect of urea on water structure. By carefully choosing the nearest neighbors, allowing urea also to be a neighbor of a reference water molecule, we have conclusively shown that urea does not break the local tetrahedral structure of water even at high concentrations. A slight change in the distribution of tetrahedral order parameters as a function of urea concentration has been shown to be a result of change in the proportions of n-hydrogen-bonded water molecules. The present result thus suggests that urea is able to substitute for water in the hydrogen-bonded network nicely without breaking the tetrahedral, hydrogen-bonded structure of water.

We use extensive molecular dynamics simulations employing different state-of-the-art force fields to find a common framework for comparing structural orders and density anomalies as obtained from different water models. It is found that the average number of hydrogen bonds correlates well with various order parameters as well as the temperature of maximum densities across the different models, unifying apparently disparate results from different models and emphasizing the importance of hydrogen bonding in determining anomalous properties and the structure of water. A deeper insight into the hydrogen bond network of water reveals that the solvation shell of a water molecule can be defined by considering only those neighbors that are hydrogen-bonded to it. On the basis of this view, the origin of the appearance of a non-tetrahedral peak at a higher temperature in the distribution of tetrahedral order parameters has been explained. It is found that a neighbor that is hydrogen-bonded to the central molecule is tetrahedrally coordinated even at higher temperatures. The non-tetrahedral peak at a higher temperature arises due to the strained orientation of the neighbors that are non-hydrogen-bonded to the central molecule. With the new definition of the solvation shell, liquid water can be viewed as an instantaneously changing random hydrogen-bonded network consisting of differently coordinated hydrogen-bonded molecules with their distinct solvation shells. The variation of the composition of these hydrogen-bonded molecules against temperature accounts for the density anomaly without introducing the concept of large-scale structural polyamorphism in water.

Like-charge ion-pair formation in an aqueous solution of guanidinium chloride (GdmCl) has two important facets. On one hand, it describes the role of the arginine (ARG) side chain in aggregation and dimer formation in proteins, and on the other hand, it lends support for the direct mechanism of protein denaturation by GdmCl. We employ all-atom molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the effect of GdmCl concentration on the like-charge ion-pair formation of guanidinium ions (Gdm(+)). From analyses of the radial distribution function (RDF) between the carbon atoms of two guanidinium moieties, the existence of both contact pairs and solvent-separated pairs has been observed. Although the peak height corresponding to the contact-pair state decreases, the number of Gdm(+) ions in the contact-pair state actually increases with increasing GdmCl concentration. We have also investigated the effect of the concentration of Gdm(+) on the structure of water. The effect of GdmCl concentration on the radial and tetrahedral structures of water is found to be negligibly small; however, GdmCl concentration has a considerable effect on the hydrogen-bonding structure of water. It is demonstrated that the presence of chloride ions, not Gdm(+), in the first solvation shell of water causes the distortion in the hydrogen-bonding network of water. In order to establish that Gdm(+) not only stacks against another Gdm(+) but also directly attacks the ARG residue of a protein or peptide, simulation of an ARG-rich peptide in 6 M aqueous solution of GdmCl has been performed. The analyses of RDFs and orientation distributions reveal that the Gdm(+) moiety of the GdmCl attacks the same moiety in the ARG side chain with a parallel stacking orientation.

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Nanotube appended membranes are shown to be very promising due to their ultrafast water transport and very high salt rejection ability.