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Water Suddenly Becomes Mysterious

Posted by timothy on from the good-reason-to-stick-with-juice dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Logical to assume that scientists know the structure of water. But wrong. A study in April by Anders Nilsson from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center concluded the molecular bonds are looser than thought. Now a new study by Richard Saykally's group at UC Berkeley appears to debunk the April results. So a new debate is born. Both scientists agree on one thing: They don't fully understand how water molecules interact."

1 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. bit of perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think most people don't realize that even before these results we didn't have a good grasp of water. This controversy dumps a whole load of new fuel into the large fire. The following issues are more simulation and protein related, but maybe they give brief insight into how much we don't know:

    None of the (molecular dynamics, "MD") computer models of water are currently sufficient to reproduce all of the experimentally observered properties of water. This is a relatively big point of contention when simulating proteins as water needs to be accounted for. There are experimentalists that chide the theorists, even saying that they won't fully believe MD results until a decent model of water has been built. :)

    We also don't quite know what the first hydration shell around a protein looks like. Imagine this is being the closest "coat" of water around a protein. This ordering of water could be a key component to understanding the properties/behavior of protein surfaces in binding to other molecules.

    In addition, water mediated interactions between proteins is almost a completely open question. As far as I know, we don't really know how to approach the problem in an elegant manner and there have been no studies that reasonably address this at a detailed molecular level (partially due to the above two issues) even in a heuristic sense.

    There is a huge literature on water. A good deal of work has been done on the above three issues and other big open issues with water that I won't go into depth on. Needless to say water has been and will continue to be a mystery for quite a while.